I created a Link Sticker for an Instagram story and used UTM parameters to track the sources. I customized the Link Sticker text to contain only a human readable word.
I got some meassages from users that the link is not working and redirects to a 404 page on my website.
After analyzing the access logs I noticed that some visitors came to the website with encoded url parameters.
50 out of 58 visitors came correctly to:
/de/example.html?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=story&utm_content=example
8 out of 58 (more than 10%!) visitors came incorrectly to:
/de/example.html%3Futm_source%3Dinstagram%26utm_medium%3DSocial%26utm_campaign%3Dstory%26utm_content%3Dexample
The latter leads to the 404 Page.
What differs between those groups is the referrer of the request.
For the correct first group, it always is: https://l.instagram.com/
For the incorrect second group it always is: https://www.instagram.com/
I don't see any obvious differences in the user agent, in both groups IPhones and Android phones of different types and versions are included.
Does anyone else noticed that issue or is this issue known somewhere?