Most South Australian small businesses, not-for-profits and councils can tell you roughly how many people visit their website, but far fewer can say how many enquiries it produced last month, which pages those enquiries came from, or whether the redesign they paid for actually helped. Visitor numbers on their own don’t pay the bills. What matters is calls, form enquiries, bookings and quote requests, and where they came from. This guide sets out a simple, privacy-friendly way to measure website enquiries using free Google tools: Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google Search Console and your Google Business Profile. It is general guidance; Google’s products, report names and settings change often, so check current details before you rely on them.
Start with what counts as an enquiry
Before touching any settings, write down the three to five actions that genuinely matter to your organisation. For most Adelaide small businesses and not-for-profits that list looks something like this:
- A contact or quote form sent successfully, not just started.
- A tap on your phone number on a mobile.
- A booking, registration or online payment completed.
- A download of something that signals real interest, such as a capability statement, menu, brochure or application pack.
- A tap on “Get directions” if people visit your premises.
Councils will usually add service outcomes instead of sales: a request lodged, a form completed online rather than by phone, or a page that answered a question so the customer didn’t need to call. Keep the list short. If everything is tracked as important, nothing is.
Step 1: make sure you own the accounts
Your GA4 property, Search Console and Google Business Profile should belong to your organisation, with your web developer or agency added as a user, not the other way around. If a past supplier set them up in their own account, ask them to transfer ownership now. Our domain, DNS and admin account ownership checklist covers the full list of accounts worth checking.
Step 2: set up GA4 properly
- One property for the website, with a single web data stream. Add the Google tag to every page, either directly or through Google Tag Manager.
- Check enhanced measurement. GA4 can automatically record page views, scrolls, outbound clicks, site search and file downloads. It also offers automatic form tracking, but this can count forms that were started or that failed validation, so don’t rely on it alone for enquiries.
- Extend data retention. Standard GA4 properties keep detailed event data for two months by default. Change it to the longer option (currently 14 months) in the property’s data settings so you can compare this year with last year in explorations.
- Exclude your own traffic by defining internal traffic for your office IP address and turning the filter on once you’ve tested it.
- Turn off what you don’t need. If you don’t advertise, you can leave advertising features and Google signals off. Collect less, and there is less to explain.
Step 3: record real enquiries as key events
GA4 calls your most important actions key events (Google renamed them from “conversions” in 2024). The aim is that each key event fires once, at the moment the action actually succeeds.
| Action | Reliable way to measure it |
|---|---|
| Contact or quote form | Send a custom event (for example generate_lead) only when the form has been accepted, either from the site’s code after a successful response or by loading a thank-you page with its own address. Mark that event as a key event. |
| Phone calls from the website | Make every phone number a tel: link and record a click event on it. This measures taps, not completed calls, so treat it as an indicator. Ask new callers “how did you find us?” to fill the gap. |
| Bookings and payments | Record the confirmation step, not the “Book now” button. If a third-party booking or payment system is used, check whether it can send events back or return visitors to a confirmation page on your site. |
| Downloads | Enhanced measurement records file downloads. Mark only the downloads that signal genuine interest as key events. |
Test every key event yourself using GA4’s DebugView or Realtime report before you trust the numbers, and test again after any website change.
Step 4: keep personal information out of analytics
Google’s policies prohibit sending personally identifiable information to GA4, and the Australian Privacy Principles expect you to collect only what you need. In practice:
- Never put names, email addresses, phone numbers or form message text into event names, parameters or page addresses. Check that your forms don’t add submitted details to the URL.
- Record the type of enquiry, not its content, for example “service: website design”.
- Say what you use in your privacy policy: which analytics tools, what they collect, and how people can opt out. If you have visitors or customers in places with stricter cookie rules, or you start running advertising, get advice on whether you need a consent tool. This is general guidance, not legal advice.
Step 5: link Search Console to see what people searched
GA4 tells you what visitors did on the site; Google Search Console tells you how they found it in Google Search. Verify your domain in Search Console (a DNS record is the most complete method), submit your sitemap, and link Search Console to your GA4 property. The Performance report shows the searches your pages appeared for, impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position, with up to 16 months of history. Look for:
- Local searches such as “web design Adelaide” or “IT support Norwood” where you appear but rarely get clicked. A clearer page title and description often helps.
- Pages with many impressions and few enquiries. The page may be answering the wrong question, or the next step may be hard to find.
- Indexing problems after a redesign, such as old addresses returning errors instead of redirecting. Our website migration checklist explains redirect planning.
Step 6: don’t forget your Google Business Profile
Many local customers never reach your website. They call or ask for directions straight from your Google Business Profile in Search or Maps. The profile’s Performance view shows calls, website clicks, direction requests and the searches that found you. Add a tracking parameter (a UTM tag such as ?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp) to the website link on your profile so those visits appear separately in GA4. Make sure the phone number, hours and services on the profile match your website exactly. Our local SEO and Google Business Profile guide covers the profile itself.
Step 7: tag your own links
Use UTM tags on links you control, such as email newsletters, social posts, QR codes on flyers or vehicle signage, and directory listings, so GA4 can tell them apart. Keep a simple shared spreadsheet of the tags you use and stick to lower-case, consistent names, otherwise the same campaign shows up under three different labels.
Step 8: a one-page monthly report
A useful report fits on one page and takes less than half an hour to produce. For most SA small businesses and councils it covers:
- Enquiries (key events) this month, compared with last month and the same month last year.
- Where enquiries came from: Google Search, Google Business Profile, direct, referrals, email and campaigns.
- The landing pages that produced enquiries, and the high-traffic pages that didn’t.
- Top search queries from Search Console, and any new indexing or security warnings.
- Calls and direction requests from your Google Business Profile.
- Website health: speed, broken forms and errors. See our website speed and Core Web Vitals guide.
- One or two actions for next month, such as rewriting a service page, adding an FAQ or fixing a slow form.
GA4 may apply thresholds or sampling to some reports on small websites, so treat small numbers as trends rather than exact counts.
Common mistakes
- Counting button clicks as enquiries, so failed or abandoned forms look like leads.
- Tracking set up once and never checked, until a redesign silently breaks it.
- Analytics owned by a former supplier, with history lost when the relationship ends.
- Personal details leaking into analytics through page addresses or event parameters.
- Judging a website on traffic alone, when a smaller number of well-matched local visitors may produce more enquiries.
A 30-day plan
- Week 1: confirm your organisation owns GA4, Search Console and your Google Business Profile, list the three to five actions that count as enquiries, and extend GA4 data retention.
- Week 2: set up key events that fire only on success, make phone numbers tappable and tracked, exclude internal traffic, and test everything in DebugView.
- Week 3: link Search Console to GA4, submit your sitemap, add a UTM tag to your Google Business Profile website link, and update your privacy policy.
- Week 4: produce the first one-page report, choose one page to improve, and diary a monthly review.
Questions to ask your web developer
- Which actions on our site are recorded as key events, and do they fire only when the action succeeds?
- Who owns our GA4 property, Search Console and Google Business Profile, and what access do you have?
- How do you make sure no personal information reaches analytics?
- Will tracking be tested again after every change to forms or pages?
- Can you give us a simple monthly report that shows enquiries, not just visits?
Talk to an Adelaide team
EITSAA designs and builds fast, accessible, SEO-ready websites for Adelaide small businesses, not-for-profits and councils, with enquiry tracking set up and tested from day one. Request a complimentary website check to see what your current site measures and where enquiries may be slipping through, or get a quote for a new website or redesign. Call 0402 401 584, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm. Learn more about our website design and development, data and analytics and managed IT services.