TON vs EUR Telegram Ads account in 2026: bids, targeting and traffic quality

For a long time Telegram Ads had two worlds. The TON account was for channels and bots. Anything about the audience itself, such as countries, languages and user interests, lived in the EUR account.

In August 2026 that changed. We tested the new targeting on our own accounts, checked the minimum bids again on 11 October, and looked at who actually clicked.

What changed in August

The TON account got the same targeting as EUR. The lists of countries, languages and topics in the two accounts are now identical.

• all four target types: channels, bots, users and search;
• 229 countries and city targeting;
• 71 interface languages and 41 user interest topics;
• devices, channel exclusions and separate settings for political content;
• both placements: a post in a channel and a video banner.

The same rules apply in both accounts. User targeting needs at least one country, and a campaign can have up to 8 countries. Cities work only inside one country.

Minimum bids: TON against EUR

In a TON account the minimum CPM is flat: 0.10 TON for any country and any target type. With a picture it is 30% higher, 0.13 TON.

In an EUR account the minimum depends on the country and the target type. Until the autumn, US and German users cost at least €1.00 per 1,000 impressions. On 11 October the same account asked for €0.15.

Two things to remember about EUR floors. They change without an announcement, and they differ between accounts: an older account asked €0.75 for specific channels and search, while a newer one asked €0.15 for the same targets.

Cheap impressions are not cheap users

To check that a low bid still buys delivery, we ran two TON campaigns: users in the USA with an English interface, at 0.2 TON, twice the minimum.

Delivery started within the first hour. The problem showed up one step later, when we checked who these users were.

We sent user-targeting traffic to our own bot and counted engaged starts: users who did anything after opening it. In the USA, 737 starts gave 3 engaged users (0.4%). In the UAE, 864 starts gave 2. The same creatives in French-speaking Africa, Latin America, Italy, Turkey and Uzbekistan had 42–77% engaged users.

The bot traffic was easy to recognise:

• usernames built the same way, such as Name + Surname + underscore + 2–4 characters;
• starts every 2–6 seconds, instead of every 5–28 minutes;
• the same users pressing /start again on another day at the same hour;
• a CTR of 10–18% on user targeting. On Telegram this is a red flag, not a success.

So the cheapest tier-1 CPM in Telegram is not automatically cheap traffic. Judge user-targeting campaigns by cost per engaged action in your bot or app, never by CPC.

When you still need an EUR account

TON has four limits. If one of them matters for your product, EUR is the only option.

The accounts also differ in how you open and fund them. A TON account is opened on Fragment after verification and funded in TON; there is no refund. An EUR account is opened only through a reseller, who usually adds 20–30% on top of every top-up, and the minimum top-up is about €500.

How to choose

1. Check where the ad leads. A bot, a channel or a mini app outside Russia and Ukraine can run in TON. A website needs EUR.
2. Do not buy tier-1 users at the floor blindly. Start with channels and bots, where the audience is real. Test user targeting with a small budget and measure engaged actions.
3. Keep 8 countries or fewer per campaign. This is an account limit. Cities can be chosen only inside one country.
4. Compare on the same creatives. Run EUR and TON in parallel for a week and compare the cost of the target action, not of the click.
5. Recheck the floor before you plan. Minimum bids change without notice, and two EUR accounts can have different floors.