One link for Telegram, Instagram and email, and you still know where each click came from
You posted an event link in a Telegram channel, an Instagram story and a newsletter. A week later the stats say 300 clicks. From where? Often the honest answer is "no idea".
Why the source gets lost
People who open a link from Instagram or Telegram usually land in the app's built-in browser. Those browsers often don't tell the site which page the visitor came from. To your stats the click looks like a direct visit, and all the channels end up in one pile.
UTM tags fix this in a simple way. The source goes right into the address, for example ?utm_source=telegram&utm_medium=social. The site and any analytics tool see the tag even when the browser says nothing.
How yoy.fyi handles it
You don't need a separate short link per channel. A link's page has a "Links for channels" block with ready variants and a Copy button:
- Telegram:
https://yoy.fyi/lviv-gig?utm_source=telegram&utm_medium=social - Instagram:
...?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social - Facebook:
...?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social - email:
...?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email
Same code, same QR code. yoy.fyi passes the tags on to the site the link points to. If that site's address already has its own utm_source, yoy.fyi leaves it alone.
Where to see the result
The link's page has a "Channels (utm_source)" block showing how many clicks each channel brought in over 30 days. If yoy.fyi is connected to Claude or ChatGPT, you can just ask: "Where did this week's clicks on lviv-gig come from, by utm_source?"
The raw data is there too. The CSV download gives every click with its time, country, device and UTM tags, which helps if your report lives in a spreadsheet.
A few habits that help
Write tags in lowercase and keep them consistent. Telegram, telegram and tg show up as three different channels.
For a QR code on a printed poster, make a separate link with its own tag, such as utm_source=poster. That keeps offline scans apart from online clicks.
If a link is already out there without tags, that's fine. Its clicks still count, they just fall under "no tag". Use the channel variant for new posts.
The short version
One short link, a few tagged variants, and the stats show which channel actually works. No spreadsheet of a dozen separate links, no guessing.