Tracking Where Telegram Subscribers Come From

link How a tagged link works, and where it stops

A link to a bot can have a short parameter attached to it. When somebody opens that link and starts the bot, the bot receives the parameter along with the fact that this person has arrived, and can write the two down together. Mini apps work the same way with their own equivalent, and the value lands inside the app when it starts.

Keep the parameter to a token rather than a sentence: it is short, and it accepts only plain characters — letters, digits, underscores and hyphens. Anything structured belongs in your own records under a short code, not packed into the link.

Three limits decide what this is good for, and all three are routinely left out of the pitch.

It generally fires once, for somebody new. A person who already uses your bot and taps a tagged link is not necessarily going to deliver that tag again, because they are not starting anything. Treat this as a tool for measuring arrivals, not for measuring everything an existing user does.

It does not work on a channel. A channel is not a bot; there is nothing there to receive a parameter and nothing to write it down. People spend a surprising amount of effort trying to make this work before discovering that the channel question has a completely different and much better answer, which is in the table below.

The person does not know they carried a tag. Worth saying plainly: they pressed a link somebody gave them and your software recorded where it came from. That is ordinary and unobjectionable, and it is also the moment your bot learns who they are — which happens with or without the tag, the instant anybody starts a bot at all.

query_stats Four kinds of link, and what each can tell you

Most attribution disappointment comes from using the wrong one. Match the link to the question before building anything.

For a channel, the answer is the second row and almost nobody uses it. Multiple invite links are covered in Step 066: they are free, you can make as many as you like, each one counts its own joins, and any of them can be revoked without touching the others. One link per place you mention the channel gives you the entire picture with no software, no bot and no tagging. If the question is "which of these three things I did brought people in", that is the tool.

balance What the numbers prove, and what you will say they prove

Attribution assigns a whole arrival to a single link, because a link is the only thing it can see. The person who heard you mentioned on a podcast in March, half-read a thread in April and finally joined in May through a friend's link is recorded, in full, as the friend's.

The number is not wrong. The sentence you build on it usually is. "That partnership produced nothing" and "that friend is our best channel" are both conclusions the data cannot support, and both get said in meetings. What tagged links measure well is the last step. What they cannot see is everything that made the last step possible, which is most of it.

Two habits make the numbers honest. Ask people occasionally — a one-question poll about how they found you produces answers that are vague, unreliable and completely different from your dashboard, which is the point. And compare like with like over time rather than ranking sources against each other: the same campaign run twice tells you something real; two different campaigns compared once tells you almost nothing.

handshake Paying people to promote you

A referral scheme is tagged links plus money, and the money changes the behaviour it is attached to.

You inherit whatever your promoters say. Pay per sale and the most motivated promoters become the ones most willing to say whatever converts — including things about your product that are not true, in rooms you will never see. When somebody joins on a promise you did not make and cannot keep, the refund request and the complaint arrive at your door. Publish the claims that may and may not be made, make it a condition, and remove people who breach it. A scheme without that rule is a scheme whose reputation is set by its worst participant.

Pay for the thing you want, not the thing that is easy to count. Paying for clicks buys clicks. Paying for joins buys joins, from people who joined for the payer's reasons rather than yours and who leave within the month. Paying on money received is the only version where your interest and the promoter's are pointed the same way.

Pay late. Card payments can be reversed long after the fact, and a commission paid out irreversibly the same afternoon is a hole in the floor. A waiting period before settlement is not distrust; it is the reason the scheme still exists next year.

Say that the link earns you something. The rule is the same one that applies to a recommendation anywhere: if a link pays you, the reader should be told, in the post, plainly. It costs nothing with an audience that already trusts you and costs everything with one that finds out later.

touch_app Try it now — five minutes

Four steps. The first is the one that will change what you do tomorrow.

1. Make three invite links for your channel, named for where you will put them Your bio elsewhere, your email signature, the last talk you gave. Check back in a fortnight. This is the whole of channel attribution.
2. If you run a bot, tag one link and watch it arrive Open it yourself from a second account if you have one. Seeing the tag land once removes most of the mystery.
3. Run a one-question poll asking how people found you Then hold the answers next to your numbers. The gap between them is the part your tracking cannot see.
4. If you pay anybody, write down what they may claim One short list, sent to every partner. It is the cheapest reputational insurance available.

rule Where deep links are genuinely better than tracking

The most useful thing about a tagged link is not measurement at all. It is that the tag can change what happens next.

A bot that receives a tag knows which of your posters, partners or pages sent this person, and can therefore open with the right thing. Somebody arriving from a page about pricing starts in the pricing conversation; somebody arriving from a printed code at an event starts with the event. That is a better first screen, which is a real improvement to the reader's experience rather than a number on your side.

The same applies to mini apps, where the tag reaches the page as it loads and the first view can be the relevant one. Step 088 covers what that page can and cannot do; the parameter is simply how it knows why you came.

Used that way the tag pays for itself even if you never look at the numbers, which is a good test of whether a tracking scheme is worth its complexity.

help Common questions at this stage