GA4 and analytics: seeing where your leads actually come from
Almost every site has a counter, yet few owners can say where last month's leads came from. The gap is a handful of one-time settings.
The minimum toolset
GA4 for traffic sources and behaviour, Google Tag Manager as the container that lets you add everything else without touching code, and Search Console for organic queries and positions.
Verify the counter fires exactly once. Duplicate tags are common on sites rebuilt by several contractors and make bounce data meaningless.
Events worth tracking
The mandatory set: form submission, phone number tap, Telegram button click, WhatsApp click, on-site chat message. In Uzbekistan messenger clicks are the primary contact method, so without them you see roughly half the picture.
Do not mark everything as a conversion. Only events you would genuinely count as a lead should be flagged, or automated bidding will optimise toward scroll depth.
Linking and verifying
Link GA4 to Google Ads so conversions import for bid training, link it to Search Console for organic queries, and confirm auto-tagging is on — otherwise paid traffic partly lands in 'direct' and ads look worse than they are.
Test by opening real-time reports, submitting a test lead from a phone and clicking every contact button. After a week, compare GA4 conversions to the leads your sales team actually received; a gap over a quarter means some channels are untagged.