A laptop displaying an analytics dashboard with real-time data tracking and analysis tools.

16 October 2026

Tracking website enquiries with GA4 key events

Is the website actually bringing in any work? Ask plenty of owners and you’ll get a shrug, or a guess based on how busy the phone’s been lately. Google Analytics 4 can answer that properly. It just needs telling what an enquiry looks like. Out of the box it counts visits, scrolls and clicks by the thousand, and it has no idea which of those paid the bills.

In brief

GA4 calls the actions that matter ‘key events’. ‘Conversion’ now means the version used in Google Ads.
Pick the handful of actions that show someone wants to buy, and leave everything else as an ordinary event.
Don’t trust form tracking until you’ve sent a test enquiry and watched it land.
GA4 will usually count fewer enquiries than your inbox. That’s normal.

What GA4 means by a key event

Google’s definition is “an event that measures an action that’s particularly important to the success of your business”. Everything GA4 records is an event. A page loading is one. So is a scroll, or a click through to someone else’s website. A key event is simply one you’ve flagged as mattering.

The word ‘conversion’ hasn’t gone away, which is where people get muddled. Google now keeps it for the actions you use to judge ad campaigns. Link a Google Ads account and you can create a conversion there from a GA4 key event, and the two platforms share it. You won’t find those Ads conversions in your standard Analytics reports, though. They live in the Advertising section.

Marking an event takes seconds. In Admin, under Data display, open Events and click the star next to the one you want. You’ll need Editor access or above. A standard property allows up to 30 key events, which is far more than most businesses should ever use.

Decide what counts before you click anything

The settings are the easy bit. Choosing is harder. An electrician might count quote requests and taps on the phone number. For a firm of chartered surveyors, booked valuations are probably the only thing that matters. A packaging manufacturer is different again, with sample requests as the real signal and spec sheet downloads as a weaker one worth watching.

So what shouldn’t be a key event? Page views, mostly. Time on page. Newsletter sign-ups lumped in with sales enquiries. Star those and the total looks lovely while telling you nothing. Picture a training provider whose key events doubled after a blog post did the rounds on social media. It hasn’t sold a single extra course.

Write the list down and rank it by what each action is worth to you. Tracking only measures what the pages already produce, so it helps if they’re service pages built to turn visitors into enquiries in the first place. Our wider guide to winning more enquiries from your website covers that side in more depth.

Forms, thank-you pages and form_submit

GA4’s enhanced measurement can pick up forms on its own. It logs form_start the first time someone interacts with a form in a session, and form_submit when they send it. Handy. It’s also where plenty of setups go quietly wrong.

A submit isn’t the same as an enquiry arriving. Someone can press send on a form that throws an error, or on one whose emails never reach anybody. If you’ve ever wondered whether your contact form actually delivers, that doubt carries straight into your figures.

A sturdier route is a confirmation page. If the form sends people to a thank-you page after a successful send, you can build a new event in GA4 from the page view on that one URL, with no code at all. Google’s own tutorial does exactly this and names the event generate_lead, the name GA4 recommends for someone submitting a form or a request for information. Don’t star page_view itself. Every page view on the site would then count as an enquiry.

No thank-you page? Many form plugins can redirect to one, and it’s a small job for a developer if yours can’t.

Phone taps and email clicks

Lots of customers never touch a form. Someone with water coming through the kitchen ceiling isn’t typing out a polite message. They’re tapping the number.

That only works if the number is a proper ‘tel’ link, so the phone knows to dial it. A number sitting in a header graphic usually can’t be tapped at all. Once it’s a link, Google Tag Manager can send an event on just those clicks, using a link click trigger set to fire on some clicks and filtered by the link’s URL. Email links work the same way.

Keep one thing in mind. Google’s help on phone tracking is blunt about this. It measures clicks on the number. It can’t tell you whether a call ever happened. A tap might be a thumb slip. It might be someone ringing to sell you a new energy deal. Treat it as interest, and let your call log tell you the rest.

Test it before you trust it

Send a test enquiry from your own phone, then open the Realtime report and look for your event on the key events card. A brand-new setting can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to apply, so give it time before deciding it’s broken. Standard reports can take up to 24 hours to catch up.

Then stop your own testing from padding the figures. GA4 can filter out traffic from your office IP address. Run the filter in testing mode first. Once it’s active its effect on the data is permanent, and anything it excludes is never processed, so there’s no getting it back later.

Repeat the test after theme or plugin updates, and whenever anyone edits the form. It takes two minutes. Tracking can break in March and nobody notices until August.

Reading the numbers without fooling yourself

Check the counting method first. GA4 offers ‘once per event’, which Google recommends and uses as the default for new key events, and an older ‘once per session’ option. Send two forms in one visit and ‘once per event’ counts two, while ‘once per session’ counts one. Change it later and only future data follows. Past figures stay as they were.

Expect a gap between GA4 and your inbox. With basic consent mode, when a visitor turns down cookies on your banner, Google’s tags don’t fire at all and nothing goes to Google. Some people block tracking altogether. GA4 will usually show fewer enquiries than you actually got, which is fine as long as you use it for trends and comparisons and count the real enquiries yourself.

Where should you look? The Landing pages and User acquisition reports have a Key events column, so you can see which pages and channels bring the work in. A funnel exploration running from form views to starts to submits shows where people give up. Compare one month with the one before after you change something, and you’ll see whether it helped. If search clicks drop while enquiries hold steady, have a read of how Google’s AI Overviews affect website traffic before you panic.

When you run Google Ads too

Advertisers have more riding on this. Key events you’ve set up in GA4 can become conversions in Google Ads, and bid strategies such as Maximise conversions use that data to set your bids. Count the wrong thing and the budget chases the wrong thing. That’s why working out a sensible Google Ads budget starts with tracking real enquiries, and why our guide to how Google Ads works for a business goes further into tracking and UK cookie consent. If you’d rather hand the account over altogether, it’s part of our Google Ads management.

Getting tracking you can trust

On a small site this can be an afternoon’s work, and after it you’ll know which pages, channels and campaigns actually bring in enquiries. If you’d like someone to set it up, test it and then use the numbers to improve the site, that’s where our conversion rate optimisation work begins. Talk to us about what your website’s producing now.

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Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

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