Performance Marketing
2026-10-21 · 9 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
When Google forced the move from Universal Analytics to GA4, most small businesses in Nepal got the new tracking code installed by whoever built their website, and nothing else. GA4 arrived with a different data model than the old Universal Analytics - built around events rather than pageviews and sessions - and the default setup captures basic engagement but almost nothing that tells you whether the traffic actually led to a real inquiry.
The result is a dashboard that looks active - sessions, page views, bounce rate - while the business owner still has no real answer to the only question that matters: which traffic sources are actually producing customers.
“A GA4 account with no WhatsApp click tracking, no call tracking, and no Google Ads link is not measuring your business - it is measuring page views, which is not the same thing.”
For most Nepali businesses, the real moment of conversion is not a form submission on a website - it is a WhatsApp message, a Viber message, or a phone call. A huge share of inquiries, especially outside Kathmandu, happen this way rather than through a contact form, and if you are not tracking those as events, you are blind to a large part of what your marketing is actually producing.
For ecommerce businesses using eSewa or Khalti for payment, the purchase completion event needs to be tracked explicitly too - a customer reaching the payment gateway is not the same as a customer completing payment, and the gap between those two numbers often reveals a checkout problem worth fixing.
Google Tag Manager, not the GA4 interface directly, is the practical way to do this for most businesses. You set up triggers for clicks on your phone number link, clicks on your WhatsApp or Viber link, form submissions, and - for ecommerce - the purchase confirmation page, then push each as a distinct event into GA4.
This is not a one-hour job done correctly. It needs testing in GTM's preview mode to confirm each event actually fires only when it should, not on every page load or every scroll, which is one of the most common errors that silently inflates conversion numbers.
If your GA4 property is not linked to your Google Ads account, and your key events are not imported as conversions inside Google Ads, the platform's bidding algorithms have no idea which clicks actually turned into inquiries. It will keep optimizing toward clicks and generic engagement rather than toward the WhatsApp messages and calls you actually care about, which quietly wastes budget over time even while the account "looks" like it is performing.
The most common ones we see: counting the same conversion twice because both a GTM trigger and a platform's native tag fire on the same action, forgetting to exclude internal office traffic so your own team's visits count as customer activity, and never testing an event after setting it up, so a broken trigger goes unnoticed for months while the business assumes the data is reliable.
None of these mistakes show up as an obvious error - the dashboard still displays numbers, they are just wrong numbers, which is worse than no data at all because it creates false confidence in decisions.
A comfortable WordPress or Shopify user can usually set up basic GTM events with a couple of hours and a good tutorial. Where it is worth getting outside help is when ad spend is meaningful enough that a tracking mistake costs real money, or when the business runs on a more custom website where GTM triggers need custom coding. Arcetis sets up and audits GA4 and GTM tracking as a standard part of any paid campaign we manage, specifically because we have seen how much budget gets wasted when a business is optimizing toward the wrong numbers.
You can set up some basic events directly in GA4, but for tracking specific actions like WhatsApp clicks, phone clicks, or button clicks without needing a developer each time, GTM is far more practical and flexible, and it is the standard approach for most small to mid-size websites.
You create a trigger in Google Tag Manager that fires when someone clicks a link containing wa.me or your WhatsApp API link, then set it to send an event to GA4. It needs to be tested in GTM preview mode before publishing to confirm it fires correctly and only once per click.
GA4 tells you which channels and pages produce inquiries, but it does not track what happens after someone contacts you - whether they became a customer, how long that took, or why they did not. For that, you need a CRM or at minimum a disciplined lead log; GA4 and a CRM answer different halves of the same question.