A channel's admins and owner may not see sponsored messages in their own channel. Telegram hides ads from admins, so the absence of ads in your interface doesn't mean your subscribers don't see them.
To check what the audience sees, open the channel from another account without admin rights and without Telegram Premium. Scroll through the feed and see whether posts marked Sponsored appear.
For direct ad placements, create a separate invite link for each traffic source. That way you can tell:
- where your subscribers came from;
- which channel brought more joins;
- which source retains the audience better.
The number of joins on its own doesn't equal quality. A placement that brought fewer people but had almost no unsubscribes a week later can be more valuable than a large but low-quality influx.
To gauge the churn after an ad, record the number of people who joined through a specific link at the end of the placement and compare it with the figure a few days or a week later. If most of the audience left quickly, that's a sign of low-quality traffic, a weak creative, an irrelevant channel, or a bot audience.
