How to track enquiries from your website (forms and phone calls)

Why visits aren’t enough

A website can get plenty of visits and still not bring in work. What you really want to know is how many people sent an enquiry or called, and where they came from. Google Analytics can tell you, but only after you set it up to count enquiries. Out of the box it mostly counts page views.

The right thing to count

Count a successful enquiry, not a button click. Someone can click “Send” and get an error, or leave a required box empty. The reliable signal is the moment the form shows its “thank you” message or thank-you page. In Google Analytics this is usually recorded as an event called generate_lead and marked as a key event.

Phone taps are worth counting too, separately. A tap on your phone number doesn’t prove a call happened, but it’s a useful signal of interest, especially on mobiles.

Three common ways to set it up

Which method fits depends on how your website was built.

Thank-you page: if your form sends people to a page like /thank-you, create an event in Google Analytics that fires when that page is viewed. This works on almost any website.
Form plugin or website builder: WordPress form plugins and builders such as Wix and Squarespace often have their own “form submitted” option or integration with Google Analytics.
A small add-on: on WordPress, an add-on can watch for the form’s success message and send one generate_lead event, without sending anything people typed. AAA Signal provides one free with its tracking setup service.

Always test it

Send one enquiry clearly labelled as a test, then open Google Analytics, Reports, Realtime. You should see exactly one generate_lead within a minute or so. Then try sending the form with a required box left empty: that should count nothing. If you see two for one test, something is counting twice and your numbers will be inflated.

Privacy basics

Never send names, email addresses, phone numbers or message contents to Google Analytics. The event only needs to say “an enquiry happened”, not who sent it. Follow your website’s existing cookie or consent settings.

Have it set up and tested for you

AAA Signal’s Enquiry tracking setup (A$299 one-off) installs or checks Google Analytics, counts your form enquiries and phone taps, sends a test enquiry to prove it works, and switches it on in your AAA Signal dashboard so you can see where enquiries come from every week.

Explore this AAA Signal feature · View pricing from A$19/month

Keep reading

Google’s Page indexing report documentation · Google Analytics reporting documentation