Invite link
A Telegram invite link is a t.me/+ URL that admits a person to a channel or group, and a channel can have many of them at once. A named invite link carries a label of up to 32 characters, which turns the link into a tracking tag: every join that arrives through it can be attributed to the label. Autogram creates named links on a connected channel and counts the joins attributed to each one on the channel Sources tab.
Primary link versus additional links
Every chat has one primary invite link. The Bot API method exportChatInviteLink generates a new primary link and revokes the previous one, and getChat returns the current one. The method createChatInviteLink creates an additional link instead and leaves the primary link alone. An additional link takes an optional name of 0 to 32 characters, an optional expiry time, and an optional member limit of 1 to 99999 that counts users who are in the chat at the same time after joining through it. A link can also require approval, so each person who uses it sends a join request instead of joining directly; a link that requires approval cannot carry a member limit. The bot must be an administrator with the right to invite users before it can create any of these.
Why a name is the useful part
The ChatInviteLink object that Telegram returns has no member count, and no Bot API method lists the links of a chat or reads a link back. The name is therefore the only attribution label there is. Give each source its own link, for example one per partner channel, one per ad placement and one for your website, and the name tells you where a subscriber came from. A link shared with several sources cannot be split afterwards. A subscriber who joins through the public channel @username carries no invite link at all, so that traffic stays unattributed.
How Autogram records the joins
Telegram reports which link a person used on the chat_member update and nowhere else, so Autogram keeps its own registry of named links. It writes a row when you create a link and also when a join arrives with a link it has not seen. Attribution starts on the day the subscription goes live; joins from before that day emitted an update nobody received and cannot be recovered. A person who leaves and rejoins through the same link counts once, so a join count reads as a count of subscribers rather than a count of events. Deleting a link in Autogram removes the registry record and does not revoke the link on Telegram.
Where it fits with UTM tags
A UTM parameter tags a click on a web page, so it measures the visit to your site. An invite link measures the step after it, the moment a person joins the channel. The two answer different questions, and a campaign that sends traffic to a landing page and then to a channel can use both: UTM tags on the page URL, and a named invite link behind the join button. Creating a link is blocked while the channel is paused for a lost bot permission, because a new link grants access to the channel.
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