Google Analytics 4 was a major rebuild that most marketers treated as a forced migration rather than an opportunity to set up measurement properly. The result: the majority of GA4 installs we audit are tracking pageviews and basic sessions, and calling it done. Without conversion event tracking, you can't attribute revenue, you can't optimise paid campaigns on real outcomes, and you can't answer the question: "What content and channels are actually generating leads?" Here are the five events every business website should be tracking.
01. Form Submissions
Every contact form, lead form, booking form, and newsletter signup should fire a custom event on submission. In GA4, create a conversion event called "generate_lead" (this is a Google-recommended standard event name that integrates automatically with Google Ads). Track: form type, page URL where the form was submitted, and any lead qualification data you collect.
02. Phone Number Clicks
If your phone number appears as a clickable link on mobile (and it should), every click is a potential inbound call that needs to be tracked. Set up a click event on all tel: links. For businesses where phone calls are a primary conversion path, this is often the most important event in your setup.
03. Calendly / Booking Widget Interactions
Calendly and most booking widgets fire postMessage events when a booking is completed. GA4 can listen for these and record them as conversion events. Without this, bookings made via embedded calendar widgets are completely invisible to your analytics — which means any campaign driving to booking pages has zero attributable conversions in GA4.
04. Scroll Depth
GA4 tracks scroll depth automatically at 90% — but 90% is too late to be useful. Add custom scroll events at 25%, 50%, and 75% of each key page. This tells you where visitors are dropping off and gives you data to prioritise which sections of your pages need CRO work. It also helps differentiate engaged sessions from bounce sessions more accurately than session duration alone.
05. Outbound Link Clicks
If you link to a Calendly page rather than embedding it, if you send users to a WhatsApp link, or if you link to any external booking or payment platform, those outbound clicks need to be tracked as conversions. Users who click these links are in a conversion state — but unless you track the outbound click as a conversion event, GA4 shows them as exits with no outcome recorded.
The Verification Step
After setting up any event, test it using GA4's DebugView (enable debug mode in Google Tag Assistant, navigate the site, and watch events fire in real-time). Events that appear in DebugView but not in your standard reports within 24–48 hours usually have a configuration issue in Google Tag Manager. Never trust a GA4 setup you haven't personally verified end-to-end.