Search and measurement
GA4 explained for a business website
GA4 counts things that happen on your site and calls them events. Understanding what an event is, and what it cannot tell you, is most of what a business owner needs.
Google Analytics 4, or GA4, is the current version of Google’s analytics tool. Reports show numbers for visits, pages, events and more, and the vocabulary is confusing. This note explains the few terms that matter for a business site that wants to know whether the website leads to conversations.
Everything is an event
In GA4 almost everything it records is an event. Google defines an event as a way to measure a specific interaction or occurrence on your website, such as a page loading or a link being clicked. There are four kinds:
- Automatically collected events, recorded once GA4 is set up, such as
page_viewandsession_start. - Enhanced measurement events, collected when that option is on: scrolls, outbound link clicks, file downloads and a few more.
- Recommended events, which you add yourself but with names Google has defined.
- Custom events, which you name yourself. Google advises creating them only when no other event fits, and notes they usually do not appear in the standard reports, so you need custom reports or explorations to see them.
Each event can carry parameters, which are details such as which link was clicked. You can see an event’s parameters by selecting it in the Realtime report.
Sessions and users
A session is a period during which someone interacts with your site. By default it starts when a person opens a page and is not already in a session, and it ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. Google’s help page adds an honest note: session and user metrics are calculated through an estimation. Visitors are recognised through cookies, so a person who clears cookies, or who uses a phone and a laptop, can be counted as more than one user. Treat user numbers as indicative, not exact.
Key events
A key event is an event you mark as important to your business. Any collected event can be made one. For a business site, the sensible candidates are the actions that suggest a visitor wants to reach you: a tap on the phone number, a tap on the WhatsApp button, a submitted enquiry form.
What an enquiry event can and cannot tell you
A site can send an event when someone taps a phone or WhatsApp link. That event means a visitor tried to contact you. It does not mean the call connected, a message was sent, or a sale followed, and GA4 cannot see the conversation. Count them as enquiry attempts, and keep your own record of real enquiries to compare. If attempts rise and real enquiries do not, that is worth looking into.
Counts are also incomplete. Visitors who decline cookies, use privacy tools or block scripts will not appear. This is a limit of the method, not a fault in your site.
Keep personal information out
Send the type of action and nothing the visitor typed. A phone number, a name or the text of a message should never be an event parameter. One setting to check: enhanced measurement can record outbound clicks together with the full address clicked, and Google’s help lists link_url among the parameters. A WhatsApp link can carry a prepared message in its address, so on a site that uses such links it is sensible to turn off outbound-click measurement and rely on your own, explicit enquiry events. Google’s tags set cookies to identify unique users, so whether you need to tell visitors or ask for consent depends on where they are; this is a decision for you and an adviser, not something the tool decides.
Testing before you trust it
GA4 has a DebugView that shows events as they happen, with their parameters. Enable debug mode for your own browsing, click your own phone and WhatsApp buttons, and check each event appears once with only the details you expect. Remove your own visits from your reports afterwards so test clicks do not count as real ones.
A sensible monthly look
- How many enquiry attempts, and from which pages?
- Which pages bring the most visits, and do those match what you sell?
- How do the attempts compare with the real enquiries you logged?
Three honest numbers beat a screen of thirty. Measuring enquiries with GA4 and Search Console covers setup and consent, and Search Console in your first month covers the other half: how people find you.