Google Analytics 4 for people who don’t want to learn Google Analytics

Google Analytics 4 is built for companies with a data team. You run a café, a physio clinic or a plumbing business. You have one question: is the website bringing in customers?

You can answer it with about 5% of GA4. This guide covers the four reports worth opening, the setup that makes them meaningful (tracking enquiries, not just visits), and the long list of things you have permission to ignore.

One warning before we start. Google moves GA4’s menus around regularly. If a menu name below doesn’t match what you see, use the search bar at the top of GA4 and type the report name. It’s faster than hunting.

First, make sure it’s counting the right thing

Out of the box, GA4 tells you how many people visited. That’s mildly interesting. What you want to know is how many people enquired: filled in a form, tapped your phone number, or clicked through to book.

GA4 calls these actions key events. (Until 2024 they were called “conversions”, and you’ll still see that word in older guides and in Google Ads.) Without key events set up, every report in GA4 is a traffic report, and traffic doesn’t pay the bills.

So the setup comes before the reports.

Setting up key events for enquiries

Most small business sites need two or three key events at most:

1. A contact or quote form being submitted
2. A tap on the phone number
3. A click on an online booking button, if bookings run through another system (Cliniko, Fresha, a restaurant booking platform)

Form submissions: the thank-you page method

The most reliable way to track a form is to send people to a dedicated thank-you page after they submit, such as /thank-you/. Then you tell GA4 that anyone who sees that page has enquired.

In GA4:

1. Go to Admin, then under Data display click Events.
2. Click Create event. If you can’t see the button, your login doesn’t have enough permissions.
3. Name it something plain, like enquiry_form (no spaces or special characters).
4. Set the matching conditions: event_name equals page_view, and page_location contains /thank-you.
5. Turn on Mark as key event, then click Create.

Google’s instructions for marking key events confirm you can do this before any data has arrived, so you don’t have to wait for the first enquiry. Existing events can be marked as key events later by clicking the star next to them in the Events list.

Make sure the thank-you page is hidden from search engines and isn’t linked from the menu. Otherwise people wander onto it and get counted as enquiries.

If you have several forms (contact, quote, booking request), give each its own thank-you page so you can tell them apart.

Why not use GA4’s automatic form tracking?

GA4 has a setting called Enhanced Measurement that includes “form interactions”. In our experience it’s unreliable on WordPress sites, particularly with Elementor and other forms that submit without reloading the page. It can miss real submissions, or record one when no enquiry reached you. The thank-you page method is boring and accurate, which is what you want.

Phone clicks

Phone taps are trickier, because there’s no page load to detect. The usual approach is Google Tag Manager, with a trigger that fires when someone clicks a link starting with tel:. That sends an event (say phone_click) to GA4, which you then mark as a key event using the star.

Two caveats. A phone click tells you someone tapped the number, not that they finished the call or that it was a real enquiry. And people who read your number and dial it manually won’t be counted at all. Treat the number as a signal, not a tally.

If phone calls are most of your business, dedicated call tracking gives you far better information, but it’s a separate tool with its own costs.

Check it works

Submit your own form and tap your own phone number from a mobile, then open Reports > Realtime. Your events should appear within a minute or two. Standard reports can take up to 24 hours to catch up, so don’t panic if they’re empty on day one.

The four reports worth opening

1. Traffic acquisition: where enquiries come from

Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition

This report lists traffic by channel: Organic Search (Google and Bing results), Direct, Organic Social, Paid Search, Referral and so on. Scroll right to the Key events column. That’s the useful bit.

Questions it answers:

• Is Google search producing enquiries, or just visits?
• Are your Facebook posts sending anyone who enquires?
• Is the Google Ads spend producing more enquiries than the organic traffic you get for free?

A channel with lots of sessions and almost no key events is worth a closer look. So is one with few sessions and a high number of enquiries, because that’s where more effort might pay off.

2. Pages and screens: what people read

Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens

This lists your pages by views. Look for:

• Which service pages get the most attention. If your most profitable service is buried at number 14, the site isn’t promoting it.
• Pages with almost no views. Either nobody can find them, or nobody wants them.
• Unexpected popular pages. Old blog posts sometimes quietly bring in more traffic than the homepage. Make sure those pages have a clear next step for the reader.

This is also the report to export before a rebuild, so you know which pages need redirects. We cover that in 301 redirects: keep your Google rankings when you rebuild.

3. Key events: the scoreboard

Reports > Engagement > Key events (or Events, with key events marked)

This shows your enquiry count over time. Set the date range to the last 12 months and compare it with the same period the year before. Are enquiries going up, flat or down? Is there a seasonal pattern you can plan for?

For most business owners, this is the only number that needs a monthly glance.

4. Location: who’s visiting from where

Reports > User attributes > Demographic details, then switch the dimension to City

For a regional business, this one is surprisingly useful. If you serve Ballina, Lennox Head and Byron Bay but most visits come from Sydney and overseas, your site is probably attracting the wrong audience, or you’re seeing bot traffic. If Lismore and Casino are missing despite being core service areas, those towns may need more presence on the site and in your local search listings.

City data in GA4 is approximate and depends on internet provider locations, so read it as a pattern rather than a precise count.

One setting to change today

By default, GA4 only keeps detailed data for a short period. It doesn’t affect the standard reports above, but it does limit the more detailed explorations if you or your developer ever need them.

Go to Admin > Data settings > Data retention and set event data retention to 14 months, which is the longest option for a standard (free) property, according to Google’s data retention help page. It takes 20 seconds and it only applies from the date you change it.

What you can safely ignore

GA4 has dozens of reports and features. You don’t need these:

• Explorations. Powerful, fiddly and designed for analysts. If you ever need one, your developer can build it.
• Demographics and interests (age, gender, “affinity categories”). Often based on small samples, sometimes hidden for privacy, and rarely changes a decision for a local business.
• Engagement rate and average engagement time as targets. They’re fine as rough health signals, but chasing them won’t bring in customers.
• “Unassigned” and “(not set)” traffic. Every property has some. It’s usually tracking quirks, not a problem to fix.
• Insights and anomaly alerts. GA4 will occasionally tell you “page views spiked 300%”. On a small site that often means 12 visits instead of 3.
• Exact matches with other tools. GA4, Search Console, your Facebook stats and your hosting dashboard will never agree. They count different things in different ways. Look at trends within one tool.
• Users vs sessions vs views. The differences matter to analysts. For you, they all move together.

A monthly routine that takes ten minutes

1. Open the Key events report. Are enquiries up or down on last month and the same month last year?
2. Open Traffic acquisition. Which channel produced the most enquiries? Did anything change?
3. Open Pages and screens. Are your important service pages getting seen?
4. Write three numbers in a spreadsheet: total visits, total enquiries, top enquiry source.

After six months, that spreadsheet will tell you more about your website than any dashboard.

It’s also worth keeping an eye on visits from ChatGPT and other AI tools, which are starting to show up as referral traffic. We explain how in measuring traffic from AI tools in GA4.

Frequently asked questions

Does GA4 slow my website down?

Barely. The tracking script is small and loads in the background. Images and bloated plugins are far bigger culprits.

Do I need a cookie banner for GA4 in Australia?

Australian privacy law doesn’t currently set an explicit cookie banner rule like the EU does, but your privacy policy should say you use analytics. If you have European customers or run ads with certain platforms, the requirements change. This is general information rather than legal advice.

My developer set up GA4. How do I get access?

Ask them to add you as an Administrator on the GA4 property using your own Google account. You should own it, not them.

Every site we launch through our web design service gets Google Analytics, Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools set up, and enquiry tracking along the lines above is easy to add at the same time. Inherited a GA4 property nobody can explain? Send us a note with the site address, and checking whether your enquiries are being counted is the first thing we’ll look at.