Insights/May 18, 2026 · 8 min
How to Track Leads in Google Analytics
Ian, founder
GA4 is only useful if a lead is an event. Here is the short version for a local business.
Google Analytics will not tell you if the website is working until you define 'working.' For a local business that means a call, a form, or a booking — not a session, not a bounce rate, not time on page.
Pick three events and mark them as conversions
Click-to-call (the tel: links). Form submit (the thank-you or the submit event, not the pageview of the contact page). Booking complete (the confirmation from your scheduler). In GA4, those are events you create and then mark as key events. Everything else is supporting detail.
Calls still happen off-site
People call from Maps without touching your website. If you only measure on-site events you will under-count the listing and over-punish the site. Pair GA4 with Google Business Profile phone insights, and use call tracking if you need to separate new jobs from existing customers.
Search Console is the other half
GA4 tells you what people did. Search Console tells you what they typed. Together they answer: which queries bring people who convert. That list is your content and landing-page backlog.
Then write the monthly sentence
A useful report is four sentences: here is what happened, here is what we learned, here is what we're changing, here is what we're measuring next. If your dashboard can't produce that, it is decoration.