Track every RFQ back to the search that started it

A buyer types “sheet metal fabrication Bulgaria” into Google, lands on your capability page and sends an RFQ with a drawing attached. A few weeks later the quote becomes an order. In most CRMs I open, that order’s source field is empty, or says “website”, or names the salesperson who took the call.

So when the owner asks what marketing brought in last year, nobody can answer with a number. At a private dental practice near Washington DC, nobody could even say whether the website brought in zero enquiries. Fifteen months after I set up tracking, the count was 821.

This is the long version of my lead tracking playbook. The goal is one number that sales and marketing both trust: how many won deals started with a search. Steps 1 to 4 take an afternoon; steps 5 and 6 take an hour a month and end most of the arguments.

Step 1: Tag Manager on every page, GA4 inside it

Google Tag Manager is a container on every page of your site. GA4, the Google Ads tag, call tracking and the hidden field script all live inside it, and you can change them yourself. Without it, each new measurement is a ticket for the web developer, and that is usually where tracking stops.

Paste the two Tag Manager snippets into the site template, so they load on every page, including the thank-you page after a form. Add the GA4 tag inside Tag Manager and remove any GA4 code hard-coded into the theme. While you are in GA4’s admin, set data retention to 14 months, the longest a standard property allows. It only affects explorations and funnel reports, but industrial sales cycles are long.

What good looks like: Tag Manager’s preview mode shows the GA4 tag firing once on every page type. The common mistake: GA4 installed twice, once in the theme and once through Tag Manager. Every page view and every event is then counted double.

Step 2: key events only for actions a buyer takes

GA4 records hundreds of things by default. Key events are the few you tell it matter. For an industrial company I mark five: RFQ sent, demo or site visit booked, phone number clicked, email address clicked and datasheet downloaded. A standard GA4 property allows up to 30 key events, so the limit is never the problem. Choosing is.

Fire the RFQ event on a successful submission, the thank-you page or the success message, not on the submit button. A button click also counts the buyer who missed a required field and gave up. Use plain event names, such as rfq_sent, so the report makes sense to someone who did not set it up.

Not every key event is a lead. A datasheet download shows interest; it is not a buyer asking for a price. I watch it, but I do not report it as a lead. Where that line sits is in what counts as a qualified B2B lead.

The common mistake: waiting. Google’s help page is explicit that marking an event as a key event “doesn’t change historic data”. Last month’s RFQs will never be counted, so start now.

Step 3: hidden form fields that carry the source into the CRM

GA4 can tell you how many RFQs came from organic search last month. It cannot tell you which ones. Your CRM knows the company, the contact and the value of the quote, but not how the buyer found you. Hidden fields in the form connect the two.

Add hidden fields to every form for source, medium, campaign and landing page, plus the Google click ID for visits from ads. A short Tag Manager script reads these values when the visitor arrives, keeps them in a first-party cookie and fills the fields when the form is sent. Each value lands in its own CRM field, not in the message.

What good looks like: every new lead from the website arrives in the CRM with “google / organic” or “google / cpc” and a landing page such as /capabilities/laser-cutting. The common mistake: saving the page the form sits on. That is almost always /contact, which tells you nothing. The landing page is the first page of the visit.

The second mistake is letting a later visit overwrite the first. A buyer who found you through search and came back a week later by typing your address would otherwise become “direct”. Keep the first source, and give the last one its own field if you want it. And if you use a cookie banner, GA4 misses visitors who decline, so report the CRM count, not GA4’s.

Step 4: a tracked phone number, because buyers call

In industrial sales, the urgent buyer often calls instead of filling in a form: a line is down, a part is needed this week. Count only forms and you miss exactly those buyers. A phone-click key event helps on mobile, but it misses everyone who reads the number on a desktop screen and dials it.

The fix is a tracked number shown only to website visitors. A call tracking service swaps the number on the page by source and forwards calls to your normal line, so sales gets a log with the date, duration and source of every call. Your main number stays on invoices and letterheads; the tracked number is for the website.

At the private dental practice near Washington DC, phone calls from the website went from 2 in the 15 months before to 218 in the 15 months after. Part of that is growth, and part is calls that had always come in and were never counted. Without tracking, nobody could tell the two apart.

What good looks like: every call in the log has a source. The common mistake: counting every ring as a lead. Wrong numbers and suppliers call too. I count calls over 60 seconds and label them in the monthly check.

Step 5: keep the source on the deal until it is won

This is the step almost everyone skips. The lead arrives with its source. Then a salesperson creates a deal as a new record with an empty source field. When the order is won months later, nobody remembers how it started.

Make the CRM copy the source from the lead to the deal automatically, with a workflow or a field mapping when the lead is converted. For deals that start elsewhere, such as a call to a salesperson’s mobile or a meeting at a trade fair, make “original source” a required dropdown: Google organic, Google Ads, AI assistant, LinkedIn, email, trade fair, referral, existing customer, unknown. Then lock it.

What good looks like: last quarter’s deals grouped by original source, with few marked “unknown”. My working rule: if more than one deal in ten has no source, the process leaks somewhere, usually at phone calls. The common mistake: salespeople filling in the field from memory. “Website” and “he called us” are not sources.

Step 6: one monthly report of won deals that started from search

Once a month, export the deals won that month with their value, original source, landing page and date of first contact, and total them by source. That is the number this setup exists for: won deals and revenue that started with a search, organic or paid.

Report deals by the month they were won, not the month of the first click: an RFQ sent in March may become an order in July. Until enough deals have closed, report confirmed RFQs from search alongside. Knowing which landing pages win deals also tells you which searches deserve new pages: see finding the searches that come before a quote request.

Before the won deals, check the leads. GA4 counts forms; only the CRM knows which of them were buyers. At ITCE, forms sent from organic and AI search rose from 303 to 423 in one quarter, while confirmed leads fell from 87 to 76.

On its own, 423 looks like a quarter almost 40% better. Next to 76, it is a to-do list: a form audit and a monthly reconciliation of forms against the CRM, the routine from my article on qualified leads. The full numbers are in the ITCE case study.

Won deals also feed Google Ads. With the click ID from step 3 on the deal, won orders can be imported as offline conversions, so bidding learns from orders, not form fills. At ITCE, conversion goals rebuilt around real leads were one of the fixes behind 42 Google Ads leads in 60 days, up from 20, at €15.13 each instead of €29.59. More in Google Ads for industrial companies.

What to do this week

Test the whole chain before you trust any report built on it. It takes about twenty minutes.

If one of these checks fails and you would rather not chase it yourself, this setup is the first thing I do with every new client.