Lead statuses in Telegram: mark interviews and hires to improve ads

What it does

A lead count tells you how many people reached out. It says nothing about how many were worth the call. Ad platforms optimize toward whatever you report as success, so if the only signal is “tapped the WhatsApp button”, the algorithm gets better at finding people who tap: curious visitors, people outside your area, sometimes bots. To steer spend toward candidates or customers who matter, the ad account needs to hear what happened after the first message. That knowledge sits with the person who answers the chat, and it is usually never written down.

Keep the pipeline short and unambiguous. Four stages cover most lead businesses: “wrote” (the person actually started a conversation), “interview” (qualified enough for a call, a meeting or a quote), “hired” or sold, and “not a fit”. Write one sentence that defines each stage and share it with everyone who answers leads, so two recruiters never mark the same situation differently. Skip “maybe” stages, which nobody acts on. Give each client one owner for statuses and mark them the same day: a status set two weeks later still helps reporting, but platforms credit conversions to ads only within their attribution windows.

The best place to mark a status is where the lead first shows up. A CRM that recruiters open twice a week produces gaps; a button under the notification they already read takes a second. Telegram works well here because a group with topics can keep a separate thread per client, so a recruiter sees only their own leads while the agency sees everything. Whatever tool you use, check weekly how many leads still have no status. A large unmarked share means your cost per interview is overstated and the feedback you give Google and Meta is thin.

In AdAce Ads, each lead counted by the tracking script is posted to the client's topic in your agency Telegram group. The message carries buttons for “wrote”, “interview”, “hired” and “not a fit”, plus buttons for the candidate's language; the same statuses can be set in the service. When a lead becomes “interview” or “hired”, the service sends it to Google Ads as an offline click conversion by gclid (“AdAce · Interview” as the primary action, “AdAce · Hire” as secondary) and to Meta through the Conversions API as an Interview or Hire server event with the fbc click mark and a hashed lead id, never with personal data.

The same statuses power reporting. The service calculates cost per interview and cost per hire for each campaign, matching leads to campaigns by utm_id or utm_campaign, and splits results by candidate language. The “All clients” screen shows lead totals per client. The Telegram topic is also where other client alerts arrive, such as proposals waiting for approval, data collection failures and monitor alerts, so one thread holds everything a manager needs to act on. If you ever need to stop sending conversions, the workspace emergency switch pauses it.

Why it helps

• Recruiters mark outcomes in the app they already use.
• Google Ads and Meta learn from interviews and hires, not from taps.
• Cost per interview and per hire become visible for every campaign.
• One Telegram topic per client keeps leads and alerts together.

How to set it up

1. Make sure the client's site has the lead tracking script from “Analytics” → “Leads”.
2. Check that the agency Telegram group is connected and the client has its own topic.
3. When a lead arrives and the person has actually messaged, press “wrote”.
4. Press “interview” when an interview is scheduled or held and “hired” after the hire; mark everyone else “not a fit”.
5. Choose the candidate's language under the same message.
6. Every week, review leads without a status and cost per interview in the service.

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