How to Master the Numbers Behind Your Telegram Channel: The Complete Guide for Telegram’s Statistics

Telegram Logo

If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It. Peter Drucker

המדריך פורסם לראשונה בערוץ הטלגרם של מורד שטרן:

https://t.me/techisrael

I love using Telegram. It is fast and it is rich with options, but on top of all — it includes the great feature of following and creating channels.

Having your own channel enables you to craft an unlimited, one-way, communication tool that bears a tremendous potential, if you do this right.

If you want to know more about about launching your own Telegram channel read: This is How You Can Build Your own Powerful Communications Channel on Telegram)

Ladies and gentlemens, I give you… channels statistics!

One of Telegram’s latest, and coolest, updates is the ability to view the behind-the-scenes of Telegram channel with an impressive number of stats and information that Telegram collects.

In this article, I will explain the various statistics that every Telegram channel manager should be familiar with.

“I have a Telegram channel, but why should I care?”

Because until now, you knew nothing about your subscribers, besides their usernames and ‘last seen’ data. Like you can see here (I removed the names, of course)

Knowing your Telegram channel’s statistics allows you to understand your subscribers much, much, better, and it’s important to follow the stats and understand their meanings, If you want your channel to grow, gain more visibility and have a bigger impact.

But before we start, three important comments:

1. The stats option is available only in channels with 1,000 or more subscribers
2. The statistics option is relatively new, and I didn’t find many guides explaining it in depth. Much of the data is fairly straightforward to understand. However, the accuracy is turning more challenging in the following data: Sources of Obtaining Subscriptions and Viewing Sources. We will review them deeply later on
3. All the stats I present in this guide are from my Telegram channel, “Israel Tech & Innovation Forum”. (Hebrew)

Let’s roll!

Entering your channel’s statistics page is very simple:

• Enter your channel
• Click on top of your channel (where your channel’s name is presented)
• Click on the three-point button
• Choose the “Stats” option (and not “Delete Channel”!) — and you’re in

Weekly Overview

After entering your channel’s stats page you’ll first see the weekly overview:

• Subscribers (for some reason this is referred to as “followers”) — how many people (or more accurate, Telegram accounts) subscribed to your channel
• Views Per Post — What is the average number of post’s views during the last week. Post is every update you publish on your channel
• % of subscribers that allows receiving notifications from you — a very important information that actually lets you understand how many people are willing to get notified by your messages during the day
• Shares Per Post — a very important statistic. We’ll review this deeper later on

Channel’s Growth

Telegram lets you see your channel’s growth rate in terms of subscribers. Telegram made this graph (and most of the other graphs in the stats page) interactive, which means you can play and adjust the time period and the time-view. Just play with the smartphone-like button at the bottom of the graph. Watch this:

Aside from the rise you’ll see (unless you did a very poor job and people keep leaving your channel), you should pay attention to spikes (many new subscribers at the same day), and try to see what happened on that date. You can get a deeper picture in the following graph of ‘Followers’.

Followers

In this graph you can see how many subscribers left your channel (red) and how many (green) joined it, every day:

In this example you can noticed a very significant jump in which 33 people joined at the same day, which means it’s worth going back to that date (plus a day or two back) and understand what led to this jump.

Was it an update that was particularly important and shared by different people? or maybe your channel was mentioned on a well-known website or blog? It’s important to know what happened so we leverage and fully understand your audience and where it came from.

Notifications

Here you can see how many people have muted or unmuted your channel. In this example you can see that on the same day 11 subscribers muted my channel and two enabled notifications.

Same as before, it’s worth going back to this day and understand why a certain message (or more) led to that result:

Views Times

What is the time in which your audience is most responsive and alert to your messages? Telegram displays a week-vs-week view, so you can compare and learn more about your their behaviour:

Viewing Sources

This is where the data can be a bit complex. The idea in these graphs is to understand where your posts are getting views from:

Viewing sources can be:

• Channel subscribers — it goes without saying that most of your views will come from the within channel itself
• Getting views from using a link — One of the best things about Telegram is the fact that every post has it own link that you share on social networks (or embed)
• Personal Message — Note that Telegram uses “PM” — private messaging as opposed to the more familiar shortcut “DM” — direct message. Interesting info that allows you to see how many of your posts are being sent as private messages (great indicator for making a great job and bringing valuable content to your channel)
• Channels — If a Telegram channel shared your message, here you will see the views that were gained from it
• Groups — If your message was shared in a Telegram group, here you will see the views that were gained from it
• Search —the Search viewing source is when a user finds your channel with the global search bar, opens it and views the posts
• Other — I have no idea, still trying to learn it

Sources of Obtaining Subscriptions

Just as with Viewing Sources, this is another case of the data that is a bit unclear. But, just like ‘Viewing Sources’, by looking into those numbers you will understand where your subscribers are coming from, which is super important in order to continue and expand your channel’s audience:

language

Here you can learn what is the preferred language of your subscribers. Because all the messages I publish on my channel are in Hebrew and the data shows 67% English, I can only assume that Telegram present the preferred interface language of the subscriber’s Telegram app. Which may (may) indicates the country in which the subscriber lives:

Interactions With Your Telegram Posts

Now this is getting really interesting — here you can learn what your subscribers are doing with the messages you publish in your channel.

Since my channel is a one-way communication channel (you can setup a mirror channel with open discussion or enable comments bot. I prefer to keep it clean), the options that are available to my subscribers are:

• Read the message (or ignore it)
• Share it further

And that’s an important point: Telegram has no Sharing, there’s Forward.

Views and Forwards: Post by post

Ok, we’ve reached the bottom of the stats page. Here you can see the Views & Forwards on your channel, but from your post-by-post point of view, and get a better understanding of what content is considered more valuable (more forwards) which, again, will give you a better understanding of your audience:

Summary

As said, knowing your Telegram channel statistics allows you to know your audience better, and it’s important to follow the stats and understand their meanings, if you want your channel to grow, gain more visibility and have a bigger impact on your subscribers.

Here are some of the things you can learn from the statistics of the Telegram channels we just reviewed:

• Times — When to send a message during the day and when not to
• Signature — If people are sharing your message — you might want to add another signature with a link to your channel
• Links — It is important to take advantage of the option that each one of your message has an independent link and allow more people to be exposed to it directly (works even if they do not have a telegram account!). Here you can learn how to embed a telegram message on websites.
• Your audience characteristics — by tracking and understanding the type of messages that received most of your channel’s attention (‘Views’ and ‘Forwards’’)as well as noticing jumps in joining rate (‘Growth’), you can access and search the network (or Telegram itself) and try to understand what happened.
• Percentage of subscribers that allows receiving notifications from you — from this stats you can understand how many people will be immediately exposed to a message you just sent, as well as gain an additional understanding of audience characteristics and how they perceive the value of your content.
  Meaning, if your content is important to them, and maybe they want to get your messages as soon as you publish them, they will not mute your channel.

Hope you enjoyed and learned from reading this guide, and feel free to ask me questions by using the comments option. And of course, you’re more than welcome to share this article.

This me on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and this is my Telegram Channel (Hebrew)

Nice update: Telegram liked this guide (or at least the Hebrew version of it) and here is their response: