Why Your Google Analytics Is Not Telling You What You Need to Know

In every website project and digital audit we do, we check the analytics setup first. Of the NZ business websites we have reviewed over the last year or so — across trades, professional services, retail, healthcare, and hospitality — fewer than one in six had conversion tracking properly configured. The rest had Google Analytics installed. It just was not telling them anything useful.

This matters because the decisions that determine whether a website is worth keeping, improving, or scrapping are supposed to come from analytics. Without reliable conversion data, those decisions are based on gut feel and which pages feel good to the business owner — which is almost always the wrong input.

The specific problem with most GA4 setups

GA4 replaced Universal Analytics in 2023, and the migration was not smooth for most businesses. Many had the new version installed automatically via Google Tag Manager without anyone checking whether the configuration carried over correctly. The result is a lot of businesses with GA4 running, pageview data flowing, and no idea whether any of the visitors are turning into enquiries.

The default GA4 install tracks sessions, users, and pageviews. It does not automatically know that a form submission on your contact page is a lead. It does not know that a phone number click is a conversion. Someone has to configure those events, map them to your specific forms and buttons, and mark them as key events in GA4. Without that step, you have traffic analytics — not conversion analytics. Those are completely different things.

What conversion tracking actually requires

For a NZ service business website, conversion tracking needs to capture at minimum: contact form submissions (confirmed sent, not just clicked), phone number clicks, email address clicks, and if applicable, booking completions. Each of these needs a distinct event configured in GA4 — either through direct code changes or via Google Tag Manager — and each needs to be marked as a key event so it appears in conversion reports.

This is a technical task. It is not complex if you know what you are doing, but it is not something that happens automatically when you install the GA4 tag. On a typical NZ service business website, setting up proper conversion tracking takes half a day to a full day, depending on how the site is built and how many conversion actions need to be tracked.

What you can see once it is working

Once conversion tracking is running, the questions that were previously unanswerable become obvious. Which service page is generating most of your enquiries — and which one is getting traffic but converting no one? Is your organic Google traffic producing leads or just reads? Are the people coming from your Instagram link clicking away immediately or actually reaching out? Did the website change you made last month improve conversions or make no measurable difference?

The most consistently useful finding, in our experience: the page that gets the most traffic is rarely the one generating the most leads. Knowing which pages actually convert means you can direct effort where it changes outcomes — not where the most people happened to land.

• Connect Google Search Console to GA4 — this brings keyword data in, so you can see which search terms are driving traffic that actually converts
• Set up a simple Looker Studio dashboard with the five metrics that matter for your business — sessions by channel, leads by channel, conversion rate by page
• Review the data monthly, not weekly — weekly noise obscures the trends that are worth acting on
• Do not rely on GA4's default channel groupings until you have verified they are attributing correctly — direct traffic often contains misattributed paid and organic sessions

When you need something beyond GA4

GA4 covers website performance. It does not connect to the rest of your business. If you want to see website leads alongside close rate, average job value, and revenue by channel — that requires pulling data from your CRM and possibly Xero into a single reporting view. Looker Studio is the right tool for this: it connects to GA4, Google Ads, Search Console, most CRM platforms, and Xero via third-party connectors, and it is free.

For most NZ businesses, properly configured GA4 is the right first step. Custom dashboards make sense once you have clean, reliable data flowing from each system — which usually means getting the CRM and Xero integration right first, then layering reporting on top.

The most common thing we hear after setting up proper tracking: 'Can you backfill this for the last two years?' You cannot. The data starts from when the configuration is correct. That is reason enough to do it now rather than later.

If you are not sure whether your current analytics setup is tracking the right things, we do a free audit — usually 30 minutes — that covers your GA4 configuration, conversion events, attribution, and what a properly set-up version would tell you that you cannot see now.