The GA4 Report That Shows Which Channels Generate Leads

Most GA4 users spend their time in the acquisition tab watching traffic numbers. The problem is, traffic doesn't tell you whether anything useful is happening on the site. A channel can drive thousands of sessions and bring in zero leads. The good news is there’s a report in the Explore section of GA4 that shows you the difference. Once it's built, it shows you exactly which traffic sources are driving which actions: form submissions, phone calls, chat initiations, and whatever else you're tracking. 

Here's how to set it up and what to do with it.

Why traffic metrics alone aren't enough

If your Google Ads are driving page views but nobody is filling out a form or starting a chat, there's a break in the funnel somewhere. The default acquisition report won't show you that. Although it tells you how much traffic each channel sent, it doesn't tell you what that traffic did.

However, for businesses that run on leads (form submissions, inbound calls, chat inquiries), the relevant question is how many people took an action, and more specifically, which channels are producing those actions, and which are just producing clicks.

That's why this report is better.

Events and conversions

Before building the report, it’s important to understand what it actually measures.

An event is any trackable action on your website — a page view, a button click, a form submission, a phone number click, a chat initiation, or time on site. GA4 tracks all of these.

A conversion is an event you've elevated to priority status. It's your way of telling GA4: this one matters more than the others. For lead generation, your conversions are typically form submissions, click-to-calls, and chat initiations, not page views.

The distinction matters beyond reporting. 

If GA4 is linked to your Google Ads account, any event you mark as a conversion becomes a signal that Google's smart bidding can optimize toward. Mark the right events as conversions, and your campaigns can bid more efficiently for the outcomes you actually care about.

One important caveat is that this report is only as useful as your event tracking. If your events haven't been configured correctly, typically through Google Tag Manager, the data won't be reliable. Getting that setup right is a prerequisite.

How to build the report

Step 1: In GA4, go to Explore in the left nav. Do not go to Reports. Click blank to start a new exploration.

Step 2: Add your dimensions. Dimensions control how the data is organized. You need two:

• First User Source / Medium — this is your traffic channel (e.g. google / cpc, google / organic, direct / none)

• Event Name — this is the specific action that fired

To add them, click the + next to Dimensions in the Variables panel, search for each one, and confirm.

Step 3: Add your metric. Metrics are what you're counting. Add Event Count — the number of times each event fired.

Step 4: Build the table. Drag:

• First User Source / Medium → Rows

• Event Name → Columns

• Event Count → Values

Step 5: Expand your columns. GA4 defaults to showing only 5 columns. Go to Column Groups and increase it to 15 or more so all your events are visible.

What the report shows you

Each row is a traffic source, each column is an event, and each cell is how many times that event fired for that source.

Read it like this: Google CPC drove X form submissions, Y click-to-calls, and Z chat initiations in the selected period. Direct traffic drove A form submissions and B click-to-calls. And so on.

Look for patterns like:

• A channel with high page-view counts but low conversion counts — something is breaking between arrival and action

• A channel with strong conversion rates that isn't getting much budget or attention

• An event that's trending down across all channels. This might point to a site change, a broken form, or a manufacturer update that disrupted something

You can also compare date ranges directly in the report to spot whether performance is improving or declining over time.

What this report tells you

Three Things:

How to use it for ongoing analysis

The report is most useful when it becomes a regular check rather than a one-time audit.

1. Cross-reference with Google Ads and your website backend. 

Pull the same time period in all three — GA4, Google Ads, and your CRM or website platform. They won't match exactly, but they should be within roughly 15–20% of each other. If the gap is larger than that, your tracking has a problem worth investigating before you make any optimization decisions based on the data.

2. Filter to a single channel when you need to go deeper. 

You can add a filter for a specific source/medium. For example, isolating Google CPC to see only what your paid campaigns are producing. This is useful for campaign reviews and for checking whether a budget change affected lead volume.

3. Compare periods after making changes. 

If you updated a landing page, changed a bid strategy, or ran a promotion, use the date comparison feature to see whether conversion patterns shifted.

One more thing worth knowing

When you mark an event as a conversion in GA4, and your GA4 account is linked to Google Ads, you're doing more than organizing your reporting. You're giving Google's machine learning a target. Smart bidding strategies, such as Target CPA, Target ROAS, and Maximize Conversions, use conversion signals to determine how to bid in each auction.

If your conversions are set up correctly and reflect actual lead actions, your campaigns can optimize for leads. If they're set up loosely,  or not at all, your campaigns are optimizing for something else, or nothing meaningful.

Getting the conversion configuration right upstream makes everything downstream more reliable.