Tracking Telephone & Email Clicks in GA4 Using GTM

March 27, 2026
  • First Published: March 27, 2026
  • Last Modified: March 27, 2026

It’s one of the most commonly asked for tracking requests I get – tracking when a user clicks on a telephone or email link on a site.

If you are not accurately tracking those mailto: and tel: clicks in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you are missing a crucial piece of your lead generation data. You need to know exactly which campaigns are making the phone ring and filling your inbox.

While setting up custom events for these links directly in the GA4 interface used to be common practice, The internal method of creating these events (specifically using the click event where the link_url starts with mailto:) stopped working reliably.

It is a classic case of a platform changing behind the scenes, leaving you with a blind spot in your reporting.

The most robust fix is to move your tracking over to Google Tag Manager (GTM).

It is far more dependable, easier to test, and gives you total control over your setup.

Table of Contents

Key Takeaways

  • The Issue: GA4’s internal custom event creation for specific link protocols is currently unreliable.

  • The Solution: Use Google Tag Manager to trigger these events instead.

  • The Strategy: Track email and phone clicks as separate events or combine them into one “Communication Lead” event using Regex.

  • The Verification: Always use GTM Preview Mode to ensure your tags fire before pushing changes live.

Creating  the GA4 Event Tag

First, head into your GTM container.

We need to create a tag that tells GA4 exactly what data to collect when a user clicks a contact link.

While you could ask a developer to hard-code these events, using GTM gives you the flexibility to manage your tracking without waiting for a sprint cycle.

  • Click New Tag and select Google Analytics: GA4 Event as the tag type.
  • Enter your Measurement ID. It is helpful to use a Constant Variable here if you have one set up.
  • Choose an Event Name. You could use email_click or phone_click. Alternatively, use a broader name like contact_link_click if you want to group them together.
Creating Tag

How Do You Configure the Trigger?

This is the brain of your tag.

It tells GTM exactly which clicks actually matter to your reporting.

  1. In the Triggering section, create a new trigger and select Just Links.
  2. Change the setting from “All Link Clicks” to Some Link Clicks.
  3. Now, set your conditions. If you want to track both phone and email in one single tag, set the dropdowns to Click URL matches RegEx (ignore case).
  4. Use this exact pattern: ^(tel:|mailto:)

This simple line of code tells GTM to fire the tag if a user clicks a link that starts with either “tel:” or “mailto:”.

If you prefer to keep them completely separate, you can just use Click URL contains mailto: (or tel: for telephone link clicks.

Mailto and Tel trigger

How Can You Be Sure It Is Working?

Please do not skip this step.

You need to be completely certain the data is actually reaching GA4 before you publish the changes to your live site.

  1. Click Preview in the top right corner of your GTM workspace.
  2. Enter your website URL. Once the site loads in the new window, click on your email and telephone links.
  3. Check the Tag Assistant tab. You should see your new tag move from the “Tags Not Fired” section up to the “Tags Fired” section.

What Is the Final Step in GA4?

Once your tags are live and the data is flowing successfully, you need to tell GA4 that these specific actions are “Key Events” (what we used to call conversions).

  1. Go to your GA4 property.
  2. Head to Admin > Data Display > Events.
  3. Find your new event name (for example, contact_link_click) in the existing list.
  4. Toggle the switch to Mark as key event.

You can also create the event as a key event by clicking Create Event and choosing the ‘create with code’ option.

By moving this logic out of the GA4 interface and into Google Tag Manager, you have made your tracking far more resilient to future platform updates.

You now have a clean, tested way to see exactly how many prospects are trying to get in touch.

Kyle

Author

Hello, I'm Kyle Rushton McGregor!

I’m an experienced GA4 Specialist with a demonstrated history of working with Google Tag Manager and Looker Studio. I’m an international speaker who has trained 1000s of people on all things analytics.

Find out more About me
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