Why GA4 Isn't Counting Your Enquiries (and How to Check in 15 Minutes)

If your ads get clicks but GA4 shows almost no enquiries, the enquiries are usually happening and simply not being counted. Phone calls, emails, WhatsApp messages and thank-you pages that never load are the usual gaps. You can find most of them in about 15 minutes, before you change a single ad.

That matters because every ad platform learns from what you count. If Google Ads only sees a fraction of your real enquiries, it optimises towards the wrong people, and your cost per lead looks worse than it is. Fixing the count often improves results without touching the creative or the budget.

The Five Places Enquiries Go Missing

• Form submissions with no event. The form sends an email, but nothing tells GA4 it happened. GA4's "form_submit" enhanced-measurement event is unreliable on many forms, especially ones built with page builders or third-party form tools.
• Phone calls. On many B2B and installer sites, most serious buyers call. A click on a phone number can be tracked; a number typed in from memory can't, unless you use call tracking.
• Email and WhatsApp clicks. "mailto:" and WhatsApp links leave your site. Unless each click is set up as an event, these enquiries are invisible.
• Thank-you pages that are never reached. Some forms show a message on the same page instead of loading a thank-you page, so a "page view of /thank-you" goal never fires.
• Key events not marked. The event exists in GA4, but it isn't marked as a key event (GA4's name for a conversion) or isn't imported into Google Ads, so the ad platform never sees it.

A 15-Minute Check You Can Do Yourself

• Open your site in a private browser window and submit your own enquiry form with a test name.
• In GA4, go to Reports, then Realtime, and look for an event within a minute or two. If nothing appears, the form isn't tracked.
• On your phone, tap your phone number and your email link on the site. Check Realtime again for a click event.
• In GA4 Admin, under Events, check which events are marked as key events. Enquiries should be; page views should not.
• In Google Ads, under Goals and Conversions, check that the same key events are imported and set to Primary. Old Universal Analytics goals stopped recording in 2023 and should be removed.
• Count last month's real enquiries from your inbox and phone log, and compare that with what GA4 and Google Ads report. A gap of more than about 20% means something is missing.

The Two Mistakes That Make the Numbers Look Better Than They Are

Missing enquiries is the common problem, but double counting happens too. If the same site loads two GA4 measurement IDs, or a form event and a thank-you page view are both counted as conversions, one enquiry can show up twice. The ads then look cheaper than they are, which is just as misleading.

The second mistake is counting soft actions as conversions: scroll depth, time on page, or a click on "View services". These are useful signals, but they are not enquiries. If they are set as primary conversions, the platform will happily find you people who scroll.

What Good Looks Like

• Every route a buyer can use (form, call, email, WhatsApp) creates one event, once.
• Only real enquiries are key events; everything else is a secondary signal.
• Google Ads and Meta receive the same enquiry events, so both platforms optimise towards the same outcome.
• Each enquiry can be traced back to a source: campaign, search, social or direct.
• Once a month, the reported number is checked against the real inbox and call log.

When to Go Beyond Enquiries

Counting enquiries correctly is the first step. In B2B, the next one is knowing which enquiries became quotes and sales, because ten enquiries from the wrong buyers cost more than three from the right ones. That usually means recording the source on each lead in your CRM and feeding qualified leads back to the ad platforms (offline conversions). It is worth doing once the basic count is reliable, not before.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes, our free Growth Diagnostic includes exactly this check: we look at your public setup beforehand and come back with three practical priorities. For a wider view of tracking and reporting, see our strategy & analytics service, or read Meta Ads vs Google Ads: which should you start with?