How to track the calls and forms that search sends

What tracking search leads means

A search lead is a call, a form, or an application that began with someone typing a search into Google, clicking your site or your Google Business Profile, and then contacting you. Tracking it means the contact carries a record of where it came from, all the way to the point where it becomes a customer or does not.

Three tools do this. Google Analytics 4 records what visitors do on the site, and when you mark a form submission or a tap on the phone number as a key event, it counts those and attributes each one to the source that brought the visit, whether that is Google, a directory, or an AI assistant. Call tracking swaps the phone number shown on the site for a tracking number, but only for visitors who arrived from search, so a call to that number is a search call and the number on your Google profile and your listings stays the same. That distinction matters because a changed number across the web breaks the match described under name, address and phone. The third tool is a source field in your customer records, filled in when a lead is created, so closed business can be traced back to search months after the click.

The Google Business Profile adds its own count of calls and direction requests, which never touch the site.

What untracked search leads look like at a mortgage lender

A lender with three loan officers closes 22 loans a month and can tell you which agent each one came through, because the agent relationship is the business. Ask which ones came from the website and the answer is a guess. The site has a Get Pre-Approved form that emails the office, and the email does not say where the visitor came from. The phone number on the site is the main line, the same one on every business card, so a call from a Google search sounds the same as a call from a past client.

Google Analytics shows 2,400 visits a month from organic search, a number the owner sees in a report and cannot connect to anything. The CRM has a lead source field with options for Agent, Past Client, Zillow and Other, and web leads go under Other. At the end of the year the owner decides whether to keep paying for SEO by looking at a traffic chart, and the chart cannot say whether any of those visits turned into one of the 264 loans.

The gap is not a technology problem. Every piece needed is already in place or free, and it is a matter of turning each one on and naming the source the same way in all three.

A worked example: one month of tracked leads at a lender closing 22 loans a month in Boise

Table Rock Home Loans in Boise turned on three things in one week: key events in Google Analytics 4 for the pre-approval form and for taps on the phone number, a call tracking number shown only to visitors arriving from Google search and Google Ads, and a rule that every new lead in the CRM gets a source picked from a list that matches the analytics sources. Here is the following month, once the closings from that month’s leads were counted.

Ten of the 22 loans that month traced to Google search and the Google profile, a number the owner can weigh against the cost of the work. The referral row still leads, and it always will for a lender, but it is now a known share rather than the whole story by default.

Website traffic from organic search was 2,400 visits in August, up 9 percent from July. The office logged 131 inbound calls. We closed 22 loans.

Google search and the Google Business Profile started 68 calls and 19 forms in August, which became 19 applications and 6 closed loans from the site plus 4 from the profile. Referrals produced 9 closings and paid ads 2. The pre-approval page brought 14 of the 19 forms, and 11 of the 41 search calls came in on the phone number on the rates page.

How to check your own lead tracking

1. Open Google Analytics 4, go to Admin, then Events. Look for events such as form_submit, generate_lead or a click on a tel link, and check whether Mark as key event is on for them. If nothing is marked, forms and calls are not being counted.
2. Fill out your own form on the site, then look under Reports, Realtime. The submission should appear within a minute.
3. Open Reports, Engagement, Key events, and set the date range to last month. Read the count next to each key event, then click into it and add Session source as a secondary dimension to see how many came from google / organic.
4. Open your Google Business Profile, choose Performance, and read Calls and Direction requests for the same month. Those are leads that never reached the site.
5. Call the number on your website from your mobile phone and see whether a record of the call appears anywhere other than your phone’s log. If not, calls from the site are uncounted.
6. Open your CRM and look at the source field. If web leads sit under Other, add sources that match Analytics and require one on every new lead.

What we do about tracking search leads

We set up the counting before we change a word on the site, so the months that follow can be compared to the month before. Every form and phone tap becomes a key event in Google Analytics, a call tracking number is shown only to visitors from search so your real number stays the same everywhere else, and calls from the Google profile are read from the profile’s own report. You get a lead table each month with calls, forms and closings by source, and it is the first page of the monthly SEO report.

Questions people ask about SEO: how to track the calls and forms that search sends