E-Commerce tracking for JIMDO Creator Shops

1. The story

JIMDO is a homepage building kit, with 20 million+ instances live. It comes with a lightweight, straight forward online shop.

I don’t know, how many shops are currently online, but I guess there must be many thousands. Every shop aims to generate a maximum revenue. I just build two of those shops and was wondering, if anyone running such a shop did e-Commerce tracking to understand the purchase funnel aiming to improve the conversion rate.

I have done everything I could, but I failed to find anyone, who dealt with JIMDO-e-Commerce tracking. That’s why I decided to do it on my own and share, how I did it.

I am using Google Analytics, Google Tagmanager and the easy-to-use Looker Studio (fka as Google Datastudio)

Since Google Tagmanager might be a barrier (with quite some extra efforts associated) I tried a solution with Google Analytics build-in capabilities.

To easily understand the impact of UX/UI optimization measures on the conversion funnel I use Looker Studio.

Hence everyone should be able to reproduce the solution below.

2. The solution

Since one has no influence on the HTML that JIMDO renders (except the head) one cannot use the data layer concept to track the full range of data that is known as enhanced e-Commerce tracking. One could achieve enhanced e-Commerce tracking with pretty much efforts parsing the DOM-Object with Google Tagmanager. Therefor the solution here is a light e-Commerce tracking.

Nevertheless, I was trying to stick to the event naming convention, that > Google recommends.

Custom event name	Trigger when	Jimdo page_path	Custom parameter	Custom metric name
session_start	A user starts a session	build-in event (for funnel)
view_item_list	a user sees a list of items/offerings	/onlineshop/ (site specific)	count_view_item_list = 1	CM_view_item_list
begin_checkout	a user begins checkout	/j/checkout	count_begin_checkout = 1	CM_begin_checkout
add_shipping_info	a user submits their shipping information	/j/checkout/data	count_add_shipping_info	CM_add_shipping_info
add_payment_info	a user submits their payment information	/j/checkout/payment	count_add_payment_info = 1	CM_add_payment_info
review_order	A user reviews his order*	/j/checkout/overview	count_review_order = 1	CM_review_order
purchase	a user completes a purchase	//j/checkout/confirmation	count_purchase = 1	CM_purchases

Table 1: Custom e-Commerce events, matching conditions, parameters and custom metrics, *) no Google standard recommendation but JIMDO specific

Next, you have to create events and add custom parameters, that allows to create custom metrics for the funnel representation.

Creating custom events and metrics of your property is done via “Admin”:

Once created and added a parameter, according to Table 1 and Fig 2, mark the events as conversions.

Next you have to create the custom metrics, that will allow to create the desired funnel insights

Bear in mind, that you will only be able to create custom metrics, once the events have fired at least once and only after 24 h time of waiting. Ideally create the custom events and let your shop run for a few days before creating the custom metrics.

Than you may use the community funnel from Ayima

and configure it as follows in Looker Studio

To finally get the desired result: