GA4 for agriculture sites: the four reports worth your attention

Written by Michael Nadalin, CEO and Founder · 12 Oct 2026 · 6 min read

Why does GA4 feel useless to most ag businesses?

Because it was built for online shops, not for a dealership selling a $180,000 tractor over three phone calls and a yard visit. Open GA4 cold and you get dozens of menus, most of them answering questions you never asked.

I've sat with plenty of dealer principals and ag suppliers who log in once a quarter, look at total users, feel vaguely fine or vaguely worried, and log out. That number tells you nothing. Traffic went up 20 percent? Good for you. Did the phone ring?

My position is simple. For agriculture marketing, four GA4 reports earn their keep. Everything else is either vanity or something I'd only open to diagnose a specific problem. I'd rather you spend fifteen minutes a month on these four than an hour wandering around the rest.

One housekeeping job before you start. Go to Admin, Data settings, Data retention and change it from 2 months to 14 months. Ag is seasonal. If you can't compare this spraying window against last year's, you're guessing.

Report one: Traffic acquisition. Which channel is doing which job?

Find it under Reports, Acquisition, Traffic acquisition. Change the main column to Session source / medium so you see google / cpc, facebook / paid and so on, not the vague channel groups.

Don't read this report as a league table. Each channel has a different job, and judging them all on the same number is how good campaigns get switched off. Google Ads catches the bloke who already knows he needs a 150 horsepower loader tractor before seeding. Meta Ads puts a machine in front of someone who wasn't looking yet. Organic and direct are mostly people who already know your name.

What I look for is the ratio of sessions to key events per source, and whether it holds up month on month. If Meta is sending 60 percent of your traffic and 5 percent of your enquiries, that's not automatically a problem, but you'd want to know it.

Two warnings. If your ad links aren't tagged with UTMs, Meta traffic gets scattered across four or five source names and looks worse than it is. And a fat (direct) / (none) row usually means broken tagging, not a famous brand.

Report two: Landing page. Where does the money actually land?

Reports, Engagement, Landing page. This shows the first page people hit and what they did afterwards. For a dealer, it's the fastest way to find wasted ad spend.

Here's the pattern I see over and over. Ads point at the homepage or a generic category page, the buyer has to hunt for the machine they clicked on, and they leave. Send the same click to the specific listing with price, hours, photos and a phone number, and the enquiry rate can double or triple without touching the budget.

Sort by sessions, then look at key events for each page. You're hunting two things. Pages with heavy traffic and almost no enquiries, which need fixing or cutting from your ads. And pages with modest traffic and a strong enquiry rate, which deserve more budget.

The numbers below are an illustration of a typical used machinery listing page over a season, not a client result. The shape is what matters. Look how far apart 'form fills' and 'sold' sit.

Report three: Key events. Are you counting the right things?

Google renamed conversions to key events in 2024, so if you can't find the old menu, that's why. You'll see them as a column in the acquisition and landing page reports, and you set them up under Admin, Events.

This is where most agricultural machinery sites are either blind or lying to themselves. Blind, because phone calls aren't tracked and in ag the phone is still king. I regularly see 50 to 70 percent of genuine enquiries come by call, more during harvest when nobody is filling in a form from a header cab. Lying, because someone marked 'page scroll' or 'brochure view' as a key event and now the dashboard says 400 conversions a month.

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Be strict. A key event should be something a salesperson could act on. Rank them, and judge your campaigns on the top of the list, not the total.

Report four: Conversion paths. How long does a rural buyer really take?

Go to Advertising, then Attribution, then Conversion paths. Google has relabelled this Attribution paths in some accounts. It shows the sequence of channels people touched before they enquired, plus the days and number of touchpoints it took.

This report changes how people think about their marketing. A farmer doesn't see an ad for a seeder and ring you that afternoon. They see it in February, mention it to their agronomist, check your site again after a field day, search the model name in April and call in May. The last click gets the credit. The first one did the work.

For bigger ticket gear I commonly see 30 to 90 days and four or more touches between the first visit and the enquiry. Parts, service and smaller items are much quicker, often inside a week.

The practical lesson is patience and timing. If you want enquiries before the spraying window, the ads need to be running six to ten weeks earlier. And don't kill a Meta campaign after three weeks because it has 'no conversions'. Check the paths first.

Where GA4 stops, and what to do about it

GA4 ends at the enquiry. It has no idea whether that form fill was a contractor ready to buy two machines or a student doing an assignment. If you stop there, you'll end up optimising for cheap leads, and cheap leads are usually the worst ones.

I've seen campaigns with a $40 cost per lead that never sold a thing, and campaigns at $220 a lead that paid for the whole year. You can't tell them apart inside GA4. You can only tell them apart by tracking to the actual sale.

So the four reports are the first half. The second half is plumbing. Every lead goes into a CRM with its source attached, sales marks it qualified or not, and the outcome gets sent back to Google Ads and Meta Ads as an offline conversion. Then the ad platforms learn what a buyer looks like, not what a form filler looks like.

It isn't glamorous work. It is the difference between a marketing report and a sales system. Start with the four reports this month. Then go and ask your sales team which of last quarter's leads actually bought.

Written by

Michael Nadalin

Founder, Market Lead & Harvest Lead

Michael is the founder of both Market Lead and Harvest Lead, building lead and sales systems for agriculture and machinery businesses across Australia and the USA.