Successful tracking with Shopware 6 for more sales

Tracking is one of the most important functions in e-commerce for optimizing your online presence. Maybe you are wondering what tracking exactly is. Through different tracking possibilities it can be shown when your visitors leave your site or what of your actions they react particularly well to. 

Behind the statement of tracking is usually the intention to find out from which sources your visitors come to your store. For this purpose you can use paid and free tools. The most popular tools are those from Google. Google has a market share of over 90%. It is clearly the largest search engine.

With tracking, you can figure out whether your SEO measures make sense or which tools your visitors use to find your store. But other things can also be tracked too. There are also other platforms that offer you tracking tools. These include for example Facebook and Hotjar. 

Let's clarify in this article, which tracking possibilities exist and which tools are usefull for this. 

Through Extensions and Store you can install a lot of great extensions

Social Media Tracking at the example of Facebook

All social media channels have their own tracking pixels. However, as they all perform the same basic function, we will focus here on the best-known and most common pixel: Facebook.

With the installation of Facebook Pixel, you can track your store visitors. This way, the Facebook Pixel can connect the user behavior of users on your website with their Facebook profiles. Through the data of the Facebook Pixel, conversions can be tracked. This allows you to create more specific ads. It offers you standard events, that can be used for tracking. But you can also create individual events, also called "Custom Events".

For example, user behavior can be tracked for these events:

- Lead
- Sale
- Key page views
- Add to shopping cart

Facebook in our Pixel Your Shop Plugin

By the way, you can also connect the Facebook Pixel with the Google Tag Manager directly. 

If you are now looking for the right plugin for your Shopware 6 store, we have an incredibly cool plugin for you! Our plugin "Pixel Your Shop" combines the pixels for all popular providers. This includes Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Hotjar. So, avoid the installation of many different tools. Now you can cover all these pixels with just one tool. Check it out yourself.

Tracking with Hotjar

Hotjar is an analytics tool. It helps you to analyze the user behavior on your website. Thereby Hotjar doesn't compete with Google & Co. With Hotjar you can track the following events on your website: 1. clicks and movements of your cursor. Very helpful! This allows you to see if users are frequently moving the mouse over a section, but not clicking on it. This would be a sign for you that this point is basically interesting. But it' s not convincing enough. So you have room for improvement!

2. session recordings - The sessions of your visitors will be recorded. You can view them afterwards. 

3. visual feedback - A flag appears at the bottom right of the screen. If users click on it, a survey will open and users can rate their user experience on your website.

We also have the perfect tool for you here! Including detailed documentation. By the way, our Hotjar plugin is also compatible with Shopware's Cookie Consent Tool.

An example for visual feedback with our hotjar plugin.

Tracking with Google

To be able to use the tools of Google, an own Google Account is necessary. It' s highly recommended to create your own Google account for your company. This way, your private interests don't get mixed up with your business interests. 😉

Google Ads

Google Ads can help you with many things. We use it for conversion tracking. But what exactly does conversion tracking mean? Simply explained: Conversion tracking is the recording what happens after a customer has interacted with your ad. 

If you want to run paid ads on Google, conversion tracking will help you track the performance of your ads. 

We have, a self-developed Google Ads tool for your Shopware 6 store. Including detailed documentation. For example, the documentation is about how to install it and how to perform conversion tracking.

This extension has a great documentation! 🤓

Google Search Console 

Google Search Console doesn't directly deal with tracking.

Still, it helps to measure your Google Search traffic and troubleshoot any issues that arise. Via the Search Console, you can analyze which search queries bring visitors to your store and thus further optimize your website. In addition, you will be notified of any problems with your website. This allows you to fix them as early as possible. From indexing to crawling information. You get all the important information about your website via the URL check tool of the Search Console.

When registering, it' s best to enter the prototype of the URL prefix. After that, you need to confirm your ownership. For this purpose, Google provides you with a file. This file must be uploaded to the main Shopware folder. Upload the file and the Search Console setup is completed. 

Google Analytics and the Google Tag Manager

Like all Google tools, Google Analytics offers you unique insights from Google. You can link Analytics with Google's advertising and publisher products.  

With Google Analytics you use the Google Tag Manager parallel. The Google Tag Manager is important for Google Analytics. Also when you test other tracking systems, the Google Tag Manager is useful. Because of it you don't have to adapt your source code every time. 🤓

Now, you are sure asking yourself what can be tracked with the Google Tag Manager. In short, after integrating the Google Analytics tracking codes, you can analyze all page and user visits via the Google Tag Manager. However, the information content here is limited and says nothing about the user experience. For this purpose, you should create an event tracking. This should, be created with a tracking concept.

The following events, for example, can be created and tracked with Google Tag Manager: 

- Clicks on buttons, links or other elements.
- Time intervals
- Connect & Share
- Searching on your page

Google Analytics in our Pixel Your Shop Plugin

These are just a few examples. Event tracking can be used for several more events. In addition, Google Tag Manager offers you a choice of dozens of tag types. Among others, you can also include Hotjar, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Infinty tags with Google Tag Manager. 

Are you still looking for a suitable tool for event tracking? Then we have the perfect plugin for your Shopware 6 store. Our plugin offers you additional templates with all triggers, detailed documentation and other features. Check it out for yourself, download our Google Tag Manager Plugin.

Conclusion

There are many different options and some plugins. But you should always include plugins in the backend of your site. Otherwise, the tracking results are unfortunately often incorrect. Setting up tracking in your Shopware store can be difficult. You should stay in contact with your Shopware freelancer or ageny. So they can check the code behind the scenes. 

If you have any other questions about tracking, please feel free to contact us. 🤓