Why it matters on an HVAC site
The default install measures page views and scrolls, neither of which is a lead. A contractor site reporting "1,900 organic sessions" and nothing else has not measured anything a business cares about.
The minimum useful set is small and specific: a tap on a tel: link, a form submission that actually succeeded, a booking-widget completion, and a chat conversation started. Four events, and most contractor sites have none of them.
How to check it yourself
- List the configured events and mark which correspond to a real business outcome.
- Fire each one by hand on the live site and confirm it arrives, rather than trusting that it was set up.
- Check the form event fires on success and not on submit, which is the commonest error and inflates every downstream number.
Worked through in numbers
A contractor’s GA4 has 11 events configured, of which 9 are automatic. The two custom ones are form_submit and phone_click.
Testing by hand: phone_click fires correctly. form_submit fires on click of the submit button, before validation, so every failed and abandoned submission counted as a lead. The reported 214 form leads in a quarter were 96 in the CRM.
Moving the event to the success callback reconciled the two within 4%. Nothing about the marketing changed and the reported lead count halved, which was the true number all along.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Tracking and attribution. The events an HVAC site has to fire before organic work is readable at all.