Analyze qualified lead volume by channel

Business Benefits

Make more informed marketing decisions.


In Google Analytics, click on Admin and select the Google Analytics 4 property that you want to analyze.

If you’re using Google Analytics but haven’t upgraded it to the most recent version, go to Admin and:

  1. Select the account and property you want to upgrade to GA4.
  2. Click GA4 Setup Assistant in the Property column.
  3. Click Get Started > Create Property.
  4. Follow the on-screen setup wizard, which guides you through setting up GA4 with the gtag.js tag, the analytics.js tag, Google Tag manager, or a third-party website builder such as GoDaddy or Squarespace.

Click Acquisition > Traffic acquisition to see all of your incoming traffic channels.

GA4’s traffic acquisition report shows all of your traffic divided by source or medium, which Google used to call channels. For example:

  • Organic Search
  • Social media
  • Referral (another website linking to you)
  • Email
  • Advertising.

Select a specific channel to see the behaviors of users who arrived on your site via that source or medium.

From within the traffic acquisition report, click Source/Medium in the side menu and select a specific source. This opens a channel-specific report that lists:

  • Total number of users
  • Total number of new users
  • Total number of sessions
  • Bounce rate
  • Pages per session
  • Ecommerce conversion rate
  • Transactions revenue.

Note down the top three specific channels whose behavior metrics indicate high lead quality.

Key metrics to use in evaluating channels include:

  • The number of pages an average user visits on your site. The higher the number, the better.
  • The amount of time an average user spends on your site. The longer their visit, the better.
  • Bounce rate percentages. The lower the bounce rate, the better.

These channels are the ones that produce the highest likelihood of producing quality leads. Now, you must determine what activities these users do on your website to convert from a visitor to an actual lead.

Go to Admin > Events to track and review events that indicate potential lead generation activity. Refer back to your funnel or campaign and identify one key user action or page view that would indicate that a prospect has converted into a lead.

GA4 includes as events:

  • A page view
  • A link click
  • A purchase
  • A specific URL being visited

Certain events are specifically related to your lead generation campaigns and marketing funnel. For example:

  • Hitting a specific thank-you page URL after downloading a free case study.
  • Submitting a form to join your email list.
  • Creating a new user account on your blog.

Most common lead-related activity is automatically captured by Google and requires no setup. If none of the automatically-tracked events suit, create a custom event by navigating to Configure > Events > Create Event > Create.

Click Life Cycle > Engagement > Conversions to review goal completion activity and turn specific events into lead conversions.

GA4 reports on activity that marks goal completion, such as a visitor signing up for your email list or submitting a form. If you were previously using the goal reporting tool in legacy versions of Google Analytics, convert past activity into conversions so you don’t lose historical data:

  1. Navigate to your GA4 property.
  2. Click Configure > Events.
  3. Scroll down to see a list of event names, such as file_download or email_signup.
  4. Identify any event name that coincides with a user activity in your funnel connected to a lead being created.
  5. Toggle Mark As Conversion.
  6. Click the Conversion tab > Reporting menu to see all of your past goals now transferred into GA4’s new Conversions report.

If you need to set up new conversions based on new website or app activity:

  1. Navigate to your GA4 property.
  2. Click Configure > Conversion > New Conversion Event.
  3. Select a specific activity, such as the URL yourdomain.com being visited.
  4. Name the conversion event in the New Event Name field, such as leadcontent-download.
  5. Click Save.

Connect your Conversions report to Google Data Studio and create new Data Studio scorecards for each conversion event.

Hubspot reports that an ideal submission rate on lead-generating pages, such as forms and landing pages, is 5-15%, although higher outliers are possible. The current iteration of GA4’s conversion report does not give you this percentage rate. GA4 simply tells you the total number of conversions for that specific conversion event. To get your actual conversion percentages:

  1. Go to Google Data Studio.
  2. Click Create > Report.
  3. Click My Data Sources and select your GA4 property, or click Connect to Data and follow the on-screen prompts to connect Data Studio to your GA4 account.
  4. Click Insert > Scorecard.
  5. Select this new scorecard and select Conversions in the right column
  6. Click Add a Filter and use the condition [Include][Event name][…insert your lead generating conversion event here…].
  7. Click Insert > Scorecard to create a second scorecard.
  8. Select this second scorecard and select Sessions in the right column.
  9. Select both scorecards, right-click them and select Blend Data.

You’ll now have a new, third scorecard that gives you the conversion rate for that specific lead-generating conversion event.

Go to Advertising > Conversion Paths to track where high-performing or low-performing traffic is coming from.

GA4’s attribution models tell you where a lead came from when they trigger a conversion event. This helps you identify:

  • Parts of your marketing funnel that provide high-quality traffic that more readily converts
  • Parts of your funnel that provide low-quality traffic, and either needs to be optimized or eliminated

On the Conversions Paths page:

  1. Click the drop-down Conversion Events menu.
  2. Select a specific event you would like to review - for example, email_signup.
  3. Deselect the other events.
  4. Click Apply.

By default, GA4 shows you up to 50 touchpoints - like pages and user actions - and their percentages that led to the conversion event. For example, you might see that 60% of the users that triggered the conversion event came from organic traffic, while 40% came from your email list.

Focus on high-performing sources or mediums and conversion paths, and flag low-performing channels and paths for future optimization.

By reviewing both the sources/mediums reporting, as well as your conversion reports, you’ll have a clear picture of what’s performing well. Focus your marketing on these sources and paths, targeting more of your traffic, social media campaigns, funnel ads, and other promotional efforts towards these high lead volume channels.

In contrast, note down which channels are not producing quality leads. Either:

  • Stop promoting on these channels and sharing these specific paths.
  • Optimize these channels and paths through improved keyword research, and more targeted advertising.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:45:26Z