Google Analytics 4 for Home Services: Setup Guide

73% of small businesses have Google Analytics installed. Only 12% actually use it to make decisions.

For home service contractors, the gap is even worse. You’ve got a tracking code on your website because your web developer said you should. Maybe you glance at the visitor count once a month. But when someone asks “which marketing channel is actually booking jobs?” you’re guessing.

GA4 replaced Universal Analytics in July 2023. If you’re still running on the old setup, your data stopped collecting over two years ago. And if you switched to GA4 but never configured it properly, you’re tracking pageviews while missing the stuff that matters: phone calls, form submissions, and which visitors turn into revenue.

Why default GA4 setup fails contractors

Out of the box, GA4 tracks page views, scrolls, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, and file downloads.

Notice what’s missing? Phone calls. Form submissions. Quote requests. The actual conversions that run your business.

65% of home service leads come through phone calls. If you’re not tracking calls, you’re blind to most of your lead flow. You can’t tell if that $2,000/month Google Ads spend is working or burning cash.

The contractors who actually use analytics have custom event tracking configured. They know that 47 people clicked the phone number last week, 12 submitted the contact form, and 8 came from the Google Business Profile. That’s information you can act on.

Setting up GA4 from scratch

Step 1: Create your property

Go to analytics.google.com and sign in with your Google account. Click the gear icon in the bottom left, then “Create Property.”

Name it something obvious like “ABC Plumbing - Main Website.” Set your timezone and currency. These matter for reporting accuracy, so don’t skip them.

GA4 will ask about your business. Select “Small business” and check the boxes that match what you want to track. For contractors, you care about lead generation and sales.

Step 2: Add the tracking code

GA4 gives you a Measurement ID that looks like G-XXXXXXXXXX. This needs to go on every page of your website.

If you’re on WordPress, install the “Site Kit by Google” plugin. It connects your Analytics account and handles the code placement automatically.

For Wix, go to Settings > Tracking & Analytics > New Tool > Google Analytics. Paste your Measurement ID.

Squarespace users go to Settings > Advanced > Code Injection and paste the full tracking script in the header section.

Whatever platform you’re on, verify installation by visiting your site and checking GA4’s Realtime report. You should see yourself as an active user within a few seconds.

Step 3: Enable enhanced measurement

In your GA4 property, go to Admin > Data Streams and click on your web stream. Toggle on Enhanced Measurement if it isn’t already.

This automatically tracks scrolls, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, and file downloads without any additional code. Free data you’d otherwise miss.

Tracking phone calls

Phone calls are your bread and butter. GA4 doesn’t track them by default.

Option 1: Track click-to-call (free)

When someone taps your phone number on mobile, you can track that as an event. This doesn’t tell you if they actually called or what they said, but it shows intent.

In Google Tag Manager, create a new trigger. Select “Click - Just Links” as the trigger type. Under “This trigger fires on,” choose “Some Link Clicks.” Set the condition to “Click URL contains tel:” (that’s the format for phone links).

Create a new tag using GA4 Event. Name the event “phone_click” and connect it to your trigger. Publish the container.

Now every phone tap fires an event you can see in GA4.

Option 2: Call tracking software (paid)

Services like CallRail, CallTrackingMetrics, or WhatConverts give you dynamic number insertion. Visitors from Google Ads see one number. Visitors from organic search see another. Visitors from Facebook see a third.

When someone calls, you know exactly which channel drove it. Most integrate directly with GA4 to send call events automatically.

Pricing runs $45-100/month for most contractors. If you’re spending $2,000+ on ads, you need this visibility. A single attributed job pays for a year of call tracking.

Tracking form submissions

Form submissions should fire a GA4 event every time someone hits submit successfully.

Using Google Tag Manager

Create a trigger that fires on form submission. Most form plugins redirect to a thank-you page after submission, so you can trigger on “Page View” where the URL contains “/thank-you” or whatever your confirmation page is.

If your forms don’t redirect (they just show a success message), you need to fire on the form submission event itself. The specifics depend on your form plugin. Contact Form 7 on WordPress fires a “wpcf7mailsent” event. Gravity Forms fires “gform_confirmation_loaded.”

Create a GA4 Event tag named “form_submit” and connect it to your trigger. Include the page URL as an event parameter so you know which form was submitted.

Testing your setup

Submit a test form. Go to GA4’s Realtime report and look under Events. You should see “form_submit” appear within seconds.

If it doesn’t show, check Tag Manager’s preview mode. It shows exactly which tags fired and which didn’t, plus why.

Setting up conversions

Events are nice. Conversions tell you what’s actually valuable.

In GA4, go to Admin > Conversions. Click “New conversion event” and type the exact event name you configured: “phone_click” or “form_submit.”

GA4 now treats these as conversion events. You’ll see them in reports, and more importantly, they’ll import into Google Ads for optimization.

Importing conversions to Google Ads

Link your GA4 and Google Ads accounts. In Google Ads, go to Tools > Conversions > Import. Select Google Analytics 4 and choose your conversion events.

Now Google’s algorithms know which clicks turn into leads. Your campaigns will automatically bid higher for users who look like converters. This single step can improve your cost per lead by 20-40% over time.

Enhanced conversions

Privacy changes killed a chunk of conversion tracking. Safari blocks cookies after 7 days. iOS users opt out of tracking. Chrome is phasing out third-party cookies.

Enhanced conversions recover some of that lost data. When someone submits a form, you send hashed (encrypted) data like email or phone number to Google. Google matches it against signed-in users to attribute the conversion.

You’re not sending personal data to Google. You’re sending a one-way hash that can only be matched against Google’s existing user data.

Setup requires Google Tag Manager and some configuration, but Google’s documentation walks through it step by step. Most contractors see 15-30% more conversions attributed after enabling enhanced conversions.

Building useful reports

Default GA4 reports are built for SaaS companies tracking subscriptions and e-commerce sites tracking purchases. They’re not built for contractors tracking phone calls and quote requests.

Create a custom landing page report

Go to Explore > Blank. Name it “Landing Pages by Conversions.”

Add dimensions: Landing page. Add metrics: Sessions, Conversions, Conversion rate.

Drag Landing page to Rows. Drag the metrics to Values.

Now you can see which pages drive conversions. Your water heater page might convert at 8% while your generic homepage converts at 1%. That’s a signal to build more specific service pages.

Create a traffic source report

Same process. Dimensions: Session source/medium. Metrics: Sessions, Conversions, Conversion rate.

You’ll see Google / organic, google / cpc, facebook / paid, direct / none, all broken out with their conversion rates.

If Google Ads converts at 4% and Facebook converts at 1%, you know where to shift budget.

What to check monthly

Spend 15 minutes once a month reviewing these numbers:

Total conversions compared to last month. Trending up or down?

Conversion rate by traffic source. Is any channel getting worse? Better?

Top landing pages by conversions. Which content drives leads?

Device breakdown. If mobile converts at 2% but desktop converts at 6%, your mobile experience needs work.

That’s it. You don’t need a dashboard with 47 widgets. You need a handful of numbers that tell you if things are working.

The bigger tracking picture

GA4 shows you what happens on your website. It doesn’t show you which website visitors become paying customers.

A visitor hits your site from a Google ad, browses three pages, and leaves without converting. Two weeks later, they search your company name directly and call. GA4 credits that to “direct” traffic, not the Google ad that started the journey.

Marketing attribution fills this gap by connecting online behavior to offline revenue. Visitor identification shows you who’s browsing before they convert.

GA4 is the foundation. But the contractors getting the clearest picture of marketing ROI layer additional tracking on top.

Common mistakes

Installing GA4 but never setting up conversions. You’re counting visitors instead of leads.

Tracking phone clicks but not actual calls. Clicks don’t mean conversations happened.

Ignoring the data after setup. Numbers only help if you look at them.

Not linking to Google Ads. You’re flying blind on which campaigns work.

Getting GA4 right takes an afternoon. Making decisions with the data takes discipline. But once you know which channels produce jobs, marketing stops feeling like a guessing game.