If you’re paying for Google Ads, putting time or money into SEO and posting on social media, one question decides where next month’s budget should go: which of those makes the phone ring? Without tracking, it’s surprisingly hard to answer. Calls and emails arrive, but none of them come labelled with where the person found you.
Fixing that doesn’t need a data analyst. It needs a clear idea of what counts as an enquiry, a few things set up properly in Google Analytics and Google Ads, a plan for phone calls, and the habit of looking at the numbers once a month.
Count enquiries, not visitors
A jump in website visitors feels like progress, but visitors aren’t customers. A site can double its traffic without a single extra call if the new visitors are the wrong people, or if they land on a page that doesn’t ask them to do anything. Rankings, impressions and clicks only matter as far as they lead to enquiries.
So start by writing down what a genuine enquiry looks like for your business. For most local firms it’s some mix of:
- a phone call
- a contact or quote form
- a click on your email address
- a booking through an online calendar or booking tool
- a message through WhatsApp or your Google Business Profile
Everything that follows is about counting those actions and tying each one back to where it came from.
Set up key events in Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) records “events”, such as a page view or a button click. The ones that matter most to your business can be marked as key events. If older guides talk about “conversions” in GA4, it’s the same idea under its previous name: Google now calls them key events and keeps the word “conversion” for the actions Google Ads uses to measure campaigns and set bids (Google’s explanation of key events and conversions).
For each type of enquiry on your list, you want a key event that fires once, at the moment the enquiry succeeds. A form should count when the “thank you” message or page appears, not when someone opens the contact page. Phone and email links can be tracked as clicks. On a mobile, a tap on your number usually means a call is about to happen, though not always.
If you use a quote form or booking tool from another provider, check whether its submissions reach GA4 at all. Many sit in the provider’s own dashboard, where nothing else can see them.
See which channels bring the enquiries
Once key events are recording, the most useful report in GA4 is Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. It splits your visits by channel (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, Organic Social, Email and so on) and shows how many key events each one produced. That’s your first honest answer to “where do our enquiries come from?”
It’s also worth looking at enquiries by landing page. If a page gets a steady flow of visitors but almost nobody enquires from it, the problem is usually on the page rather than with the traffic. We’ve covered the common culprits in why your website is half of your Google Ads campaign, and most of them apply to pages that rank organically too.
Tag the links you share with UTM parameters
GA4 can only put a visit in the right channel if it knows where the visit came from. Google Ads handles this automatically through auto-tagging, as long as your Ads and GA4 accounts are linked. For almost everything else, such as the website link on your Google Business Profile, links in email newsletters, social posts or a QR code on a flyer, add UTM parameters to the end of the link. For example:
https://www.yoursite.co.uk/boiler-servicing/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=september
Google recommends always setting utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, and sticking to one naming style, because the values are case-sensitive: “Email” and “email” show up as two different things (Google’s guide to UTM parameters). Tagging your Business Profile link also lets you see those visits separately from the rest of your organic search traffic.
Your Google Business Profile has its own Performance report too, which shows how many times people tapped the call button on your profile. It’s a useful count of calls that would otherwise never be credited to anything.
Phone calls: the enquiries most setups miss
For trades, clinics, solicitors and plenty of other local businesses, the phone is where most enquiries happen. A basic analytics setup can only see a click or tap on a phone number, which mostly happens on mobiles. It can’t see someone who reads your number on a laptop and dials it from their mobile, or who rings three days later. Call tracking closes that gap, and there are two main ways to do it.
Google Ads call conversions
Google Ads has call tracking built in, using Google forwarding numbers, which are available in the UK. It covers three situations:
- Calls from your ads. When someone taps the call button on a call asset or call ad, Google routes the call through a forwarding number and counts it as a conversion if it lasts longer than a minimum length you set.
- Calls to the number on your website. A snippet of code swaps your number for a Google forwarding number, but only for visitors who arrived from an ad. The call still reaches your normal line, Google doesn’t charge for the numbers, and the call counts as a conversion if it passes your minimum length.
- Clicks on your number on a mobile site. This counts the tap, not whether a call took place, so it’s the least reliable of the three.
Google’s help page on phone call conversion tracking explains the setup. The limitation is that it only sees Google Ads traffic. A call from someone who found you through organic search, your Business Profile or a Facebook post won’t show up.
Dynamic number insertion for every channel
A dedicated call tracking service fills that gap using dynamic number insertion. It holds a small pool of tracking numbers and shows a different one on your website depending on how the visitor arrived: Google Ads, organic search, social media, an email and so on. Every number forwards to your real phone, so nothing changes for whoever answers, but each call arrives with its source attached. Many services can also send calls into GA4 and Google Ads, so phone enquiries sit in the same reports as form enquiries.
Calls that felt like they “came from Google” then split into ads, organic search and your Business Profile, and you can see which pages and keywords lead to calls rather than just clicks.
Two practical points. Keep your main business number on your Google Business Profile and directory listings, so your details stay consistent across the web; the number swap only needs to happen on your website. And set a sensible minimum call length, because a ten-second call from someone who dialled the wrong firm isn’t an enquiry.
Record what happened on each call
The number of calls is a start, not the answer. A four-minute conversation that ends in a booked job isn’t worth the same as a caller looking for a different business. Many call tracking tools let you tag each call with an outcome, such as new enquiry, booked job, existing customer, spam or wrong number. A simple tally in a spreadsheet works too. Outcomes are what tell you whether a campaign is producing work, and they stop a good campaign being paused because its calls were never counted.
Missed calls deserve attention too. Enquiries going to voicemail at busy times is a call-handling problem rather than a marketing one, but you’d never spot it without tracking.
If you record calls, tell people. A recording is personal data under UK GDPR, so you need a lawful reason to record, and the ICO says you must give people privacy information “at the time you obtain their data” (ICO guidance on the right to be informed). In practice that usually means a short message at the start of the call, backed up by fuller details in your privacy notice. A line in your website’s privacy policy on its own is unlikely to be enough, because most callers will never see it.
Ask every new enquiry how they found you
Digital tracking will never catch everything. Some visitors decline cookies, people switch between phone and laptop, and word of mouth doesn’t appear in any report. So ask every new enquiry “how did you hear about us?” and note the answer somewhere simple, even a shared spreadsheet. It catches the neighbour’s recommendation or the van someone saw on the road, and gives you a sense check against the reports.
Test your tracking before you trust it
A short test catches most problems:
- Submit a test enquiry through each form on your site and check it appears once, and only once, as a key event in GA4 (the Realtime report shows events as they happen) and in any form or call tracking tool you use.
- Ring the number shown on your website and check the call appears in your call tracking reports with the right source.
- If you use a booking or quote tool from another provider, make a test booking and check it reaches GA4 and Google Ads, not just the provider’s dashboard.
- Repeat the checks after any change to your website, forms or phone system.
Google Ads accounts have a few extra problems of their own, such as tags that fire twice and conversions counted more than once. We’ve covered those in Google Ads conversion tracking mistakes that skew your data.
Turn the numbers into budget decisions
Once enquiries are tracked by source, half an hour a month is enough. Look at how many enquiries each channel produced, what each one cost, and how many turned into paying work. Then move money towards what’s producing jobs and question what isn’t.
Be careful about crediting only the last thing someone did. Say you run a roofing firm in Stroud. A homeowner clicks one of your ads, reads your page on flat roofs, then leaves. Two days later they search for your business name and ring the number on your Business Profile. Judged on that final step alone, the ad did nothing and the profile gets the credit. Pause the ads, though, and those name searches may quietly dry up. Reports show you where the last step happened; your “how did you hear about us?” answers and a bit of common sense fill in the rest.
None of this has to be perfect. A setup that captures most enquiries accurately is far more useful than none, because you’re deciding from real numbers rather than a feeling that the phone has been busier.
Not sure your tracking is telling the whole story? A free Google Ads audit is a good way to get a second opinion if you advertise on Google, or get in touch on 0330 223 0847 and we’ll talk through your whole setup, SEO included.
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