Put utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign on an ad's destination and point it at a t.me address. The channel opens and the parameters are gone. There is no page to read them on, no cookie set on any domain you own, and nothing forwarded into the app. That is the first leak, it is the most famous, and it is also the easiest to fix.
The remaining four are the ones that quietly decide how much of your reporting is real.
Leak one: the hop that never happened
The fix for the t.me problem is not clever. The click has to land somewhere you control for long enough to record what it was carrying. A tracking link sits between the advertisement and Telegram, reads the parameters, stores the click identifiers the platforms use for matching along with timestamp, country, device and referrer, then sends the visitor onward.
From that point the campaign values are a record rather than a query string, and nothing downstream depends on Telegram passing anything along. It never will. The mechanics are in tracking links.
Skip this and every later event arrives at the advertising platform technically valid and impossible to attach to anyone.
Leak two: joins that resolve to a campaign, not a person
Storing the click is half the job. Tying it to the human who arrives is the other half, and the three available methods are not equally strong.
Send traffic to a bot and the click identifier travels in the bot's start parameter, so the first message the bot receives already knows which click produced it. That is the only method that resolves to an individual. Use a per-campaign invite link for a channel or group and joins resolve to the campaign, which is enough to compare creatives and not enough to attribute a single deposit. Fall back to the first-party cookie on the link domain and a bridge page on that same domain can read it back later, provided the same browser returns.
Most attribution disappointment comes from running serious paid traffic into a channel and then expecting person-level answers. Point money at a bot. The trade-off between the two doors is set out in bot or personal account.
Leak three: the forward
Somebody joins, likes what they see, and forwards your channel to three friends. Those three arrive with no click, no parameters and no relationship to any advertisement, and there is no honest way to attribute them.
This is worth naming rather than patching, because organic spread from paid traffic is real and it means your true return is understated rather than overstated. Do not build a model that guesses at it. A funnel where 20 percent of joins arrive untagged and get counted as unattributed is more useful than one where they get allocated to whichever campaign was running that day.
Unattributed is a valid answer. The dangerous setups are the ones that never produce it, because a report with no unattributed bucket is not measuring everything. It is guessing about the remainder.
Leak four: the device switch
A person taps an advertisement on a phone, joins the channel on that phone, and three weeks later opens the bridge page on a laptop to verify a deposit. The cookie fallback is gone, because the cookie lived in the browser on the phone.
If the traffic went to a bot, this does not matter: the identity was captured at the start parameter and travels with the contact record, not with the browser. If the traffic went to a channel and you were relying on the cookie, the chain breaks here and there is no way to know it broke. Which is the real argument for bots over channels in paid funnels, more than any conversion-rate claim.
Leak five: the value that was typed
The final leak is not identity, it is truth. A conversion attributed perfectly to the right campaign, carrying a deposit amount somebody typed into a form to get into a private group, is a precise attribution of a number that may be wrong.
Value-based bidding acts on that number with total confidence and will happily go and find more people who resemble the ones who overstated. Clamp typed fields with a minimum and a maximum, or send a fixed value until the amount can be confirmed against a checkout or a broker connection, as covered in verified conversions. And carry one limit with you: some broker affiliate APIs report that a deposit happened without reporting its size, so a verified deposit is not always a verified figure.
What is fixable and what is not
Two of the five are solved by plumbing. The t.me hop is fixed by the tracking link, and the identity problem is fixed by sending paid traffic to a bot rather than a channel. Both are configuration decisions you make once.
One is fixed by discipline. Values should be clamped, fixed, or held until confirmed, and that choice needs to be documented, because switching modes halfway through a campaign produces a discontinuity in the value curve that looks exactly like a performance change.
Two are not fixable at all. Forwards cannot be attributed and cross-device returns to a channel funnel cannot be recovered. The right response is a reporting habit rather than a feature: keep an unattributed bucket, watch its share, and treat a growing one as information about how your content is spreading rather than as a defect to be engineered away.
None of this says anything about outcomes for the people at the end of the funnel. Attribution tells you which advertising works. Trading carries a high risk of loss, signals and copied trades are information and tooling rather than advice, and no measurement improves anyone's results.
"Half of attribution work is plumbing and the other half is admitting which clicks you are never going to identify. The second half is what keeps the first half honest."
— Alex Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- The t.me hop drops every parameter; a tracking link is the only thing that catches them.
- Only a bot start parameter resolves a click to an individual person.
- Forwards and cross-device returns to a channel funnel are not recoverable, and should stay unattributed.
- A perfectly attributed conversion with a typed value is still a wrong number.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do my UTMs disappear when I link to Telegram?
Telegram does not forward a query string into the app, there is no page to read the parameters on, and no cookie is set on a domain you own. The values have to be captured by a link on your own domain before the visitor is passed onward.
Is a channel invite link enough for paid traffic?
It is enough to compare creatives, because joins resolve to the campaign. It is not enough to attribute an individual deposit weeks later. For campaigns you intend to scale, point the traffic at a bot instead.
How much unattributed traffic is normal?
There is no universal figure worth quoting, and anyone offering one is guessing. What matters is that the bucket exists in your reporting and that you watch its direction over time rather than trying to make it disappear.
About the Author
Alex Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He built eTrader, the terminal, the mobile apps, eTrader Broker, Copytrading, Business and Community, along with the worldwide clustered-server infrastructure it all runs on, with his brother Roman Onta helping on the design, and he leads that division today. Together with Roman he builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals, and the two of them carry worldwide compliance, payment processing and international business structuring side by side. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.