How to Set Up Google Analytics Goals That Actually Measure Enquiries

02 October 2026·6 min read

Quick answer: GA4 tracks "events," not the "goals" Universal Analytics used, and most businesses never set up the events that actually matter — form submissions, phone clicks, and booking confirmations. Instead they're staring at pageviews and session counts that say nothing about whether the website is generating real enquiries. Mark the right events as "key events" (GA4's version of conversions) and your reports finally answer the question you actually care about: is this website making the phone ring? 📈

Nearly every small business owner we talk to has GA4 installed, and nearly none of them can tell us, off the top of their head, how many enquiries their website generated last month. Not visits — enquiries. That gap exists because GA4 ships tracking pageviews, scrolls, and clicks out of the box, but it has no idea what a "form submitted" or "call button pressed" event looks like on your specific site until you tell it 💖. The good news: this is a one-afternoon job for most website platforms, not a developer project.

What most businesses get wrong

The usual mistake is treating GA4's default dashboard as the finished product. Out of the box, GA4 happily reports "page_view," "scroll," and "session_start" — all real events, none of them revenue signals. Business owners then make decisions off total users or average engagement time, numbers that can go up while enquiries go down (more traffic from an irrelevant source will do exactly that). The second mistake is setting up tracking once and never checking it — forms get redesigned, phone numbers get swapped for click-to-call widgets, and the old event quietly stops firing while the reports keep looking normal because nobody's watching for a zero.

The enquiry-tracking setup, step by step:

List your real enquiry actions first. Before touching GA4, write down every way someone can actually enquire on your site: contact form, "request a quote" button, phone number click, email link click, booking widget confirmation, live chat start.
Turn on Enhanced Measurement. In GA4 Admin → Data Streams → your web stream, Enhanced Measurement auto-tracks outbound clicks and some form interactions — check it's switched on, since it's half the job for free.
Add a form_submit or generate_lead event for your contact/quote forms. If your form tool (Typeform, native platform forms, a booking plugin) fires a "thank you" page on submit, the simplest method is a GA4 event triggered on that thank-you page URL via Google Tag Manager, no code required.
Track phone and email clicks as events — in Tag Manager, a trigger on clicks where the link starts with tel: or mailto: covers this in a few minutes.
Mark each as a "key event." In GA4 Admin → Events, toggle "Mark as key event" next to each enquiry action. This is what makes them show up in conversion reporting instead of getting lost in the general events list.
Test it. Submit your own form, click your own phone number, and check Realtime reports in GA4 to confirm the event fires before you call it done.

A booking-based business with lots of no-shows: tracking "booking confirmed" as a key event (not just "booking page viewed") revealed that one paid channel was driving plenty of clicks to the booking page but very few actual confirmations — the channel looked great on pageviews and terrible on real bookings once the right event was in place.

A B2B firm with a long sales cycle: the enquiry that mattered wasn't the newsletter signup GA4 was already tracking by default — it was the "book a call" form three clicks deeper. Once that got marked as the key event, half the "high-performing" blog content turned out to generate reads, not enquiries, and budget shifted accordingly.

A business that relies on word of mouth: most enquiries arrived by phone, not form — a business that only tracked form submissions was convinced its website "didn't work." Adding call-click tracking showed the website was actually feeding plenty of phone enquiries; it just wasn't being measured.

How to actually set this up

If you're comfortable in Google Tag Manager, build each enquiry action as a trigger-and-tag pair: a trigger on the thank-you page URL or click type, and a GA4 Event tag that fires your chosen event name (keep names simple and consistent, like enquiry_form_submit or phone_click). If you're not using Tag Manager yet, most website platforms (Shopify, Squarespace, WordPress with a plugin) have a native way to fire a GA4 event on form completion — check your platform's help docs for "GA4 event" before building something custom. Once events are flowing, go to GA4 Admin → Events, find each one in the list, and flip "Mark as key event" — this single toggle is what turns a random event into a reportable conversion you can see in the Reports → Acquisition and Advertising sections, broken down by channel and campaign.

💡 Give every enquiry event a plain-English name before you build it. "Event 23" six months from now means nothing to anyone — enquiry_form_submit, phone_click, and booking_confirmed will still make sense when you're trying to remember what you set up.

Mistakes to avoid

Marking pageviews as key events: a "thank you page viewed" event is useful but counting the pageview itself double-dips if someone refreshes or bookmarks the page — use the actual action (submit, click) where possible.
Never testing the event after launch: a broken form redesign six months later can silently zero out your enquiry tracking while every other number still looks normal.
Tracking too many "soft" actions as key events: newsletter signups and PDF downloads are useful, but mixing them in with genuine enquiries inflates your conversion count and muddies the real number.
Ignoring phone and email clicks: for a lot of local and word-of-mouth businesses, this is the majority of enquiries and it's invisible in GA4 by default.
Setting it up once and forgetting it: check your key events quarterly, especially after any website or booking system changes.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need Google Tag Manager to do this?

It makes custom events much easier, but it's not strictly required — some platforms let you fire GA4 events natively, and GA4's Enhanced Measurement already covers some clicks automatically. If you're not technical, it's worth getting someone to set this up once properly rather than guessing; a half-working event is worse than none, because it gives you false confidence.

What's the difference between a "key event" and a regular event?

Every key event is an event, but not every event is a key event. Key events are the subset you've told GA4 actually represents a conversion — they're what shows up in conversion-focused reports and what Google Ads can optimise campaigns toward, if you're running paid ads.

How long until I see useful data?

Once events are firing correctly, you'll see them in Realtime immediately, but give it two to four weeks of normal traffic before drawing conclusions — a few days of data, especially for a lower-traffic site, can look misleading either way.

Can GA4 tell me exactly who enquired?

No — GA4 reports on anonymised, aggregated behaviour, not identifiable individuals, and that's a deliberate privacy boundary, not a setup gap. For that level of detail you'd pair GA4 with your CRM or form tool's own submission records, which do capture names and details directly.

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Written by

Kate, founder of Chronically Online

I help Gold Coast and Brisbane businesses grow with branding, websites and marketing that actually works.

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