A client writes to you in Telegram: "Hi, how much is it?" You answer, agree, they buy. Great.
Now a question: where did they come from? Did they see an ad? Read a post? Scan the QR code on your business card? Find the link in your Instagram profile?
If the answer is "no idea", you're not alone. Most businesses are like that. And because of it, money and time go wherever it "seems to work".
Why it matters
Imagine: you pay for ads, post every day, hand out business cards and run Instagram. Clients come. But what exactly brings them?
It may turn out that the ads bring nobody, and one link in your profile brings half of your clients. Then the ad money can go elsewhere and the profile gets more attention. But without numbers you won't know. You'll keep doing a bit of everything and hoping.
Your own link for every place
The fix is simple: every place gets its own link. Then the link tells you where the person came from.
If clients write to your Telegram bot, here's how. Take the usual link to your bot and add a tag at the end:
?start=insta— for your Instagram profile;?start=post— for a channel post;?start=vizitka— for the QR code on your business card;?start=ads— for an ad.
The person taps it — and the bot sees which tag they came with. Nothing changes for the person: they just land in the chat.
For a website, utm parameters in the link do the same — any visit counter understands them.
Three rules
1. One place — one link. If your profile, post and ad share the same link, you can't tell who came from where again. Even two posts are better with different tags: that way you see which text worked.
2. Clear names. In a month you should understand a tag at a glance. "post_2910" — the post of 29 October. "x7" — unclear by tomorrow.
3. Count after a week. Not the next day — people need time. After a week, see how many people came by each tag.
What to do with the numbers
Once you have numbers, decisions get simple.
Where it's zero — change the text, the picture or the place. Still zero — drop it and save your energy.
Where people come — invest more: post more often, more budget, a better spot.
Where people come but don't buy — look at what happens after the first message. Maybe the answer comes a day later. Maybe the person asked the price, went quiet, and nobody wrote to them again.
What it looks like for us
At MILAGPT we put our own tag on every post, ad and profile. The numbers surprised us more than once.
One link in a LinkedIn profile brought five people. Each of the channel posts with its own tag brought one. Without tags we'd think "everything works a little" and keep doing it all the same way.
How Mila helps
Tagging links by hand is easy, but easy to forget or mix up. Mila suggests which tag to put in each place and checks that one link isn't used in two places at once.
Your step for today
List every place that has a link to you: profile, channel, ads, business card, website. Next to each — its own tag. Put the links in today, and count in a week.