There's been a lot of talk in SEO circles recently about conversions.

Its easy to tell how much money you're making, but how do you test how well your site is converting well? How do you tell which pages are inspiring people to buy your products? How do you find out where the good customers are coming from and which sites are just sending you time-wasters and tire-kickers? Goals in Google Analytics.

One problem ... if you're using a shopping cart, goal-tracking is relatively simple but Joomla doesn't make it easy to set up goals when you're generating leads via contact forms.

Goals require people to land on a single page, but lots of contact and enquiry forms simply reload on the same page. So to set up a goal, we'll need to hack the form we use and send people to a single page. Its going to have three advantages:

1. It'll allow the creation of goals that we can define in Google Analytics.
2. People get confused by the Joomla contact forms as they are now. Its so easy to miss that very small "Thank You" at the top of the page
3. You can use the landing page for much more than just the tracking code. Its a great place to advertise products and try to upsell.

Default Joomla Contact Form

Look in components/com_contact/contact.php. You'll need to change line 456:

$link = sefRelToAbs( 'index.php?option=com_contact&task=view&contact_id='. $contact[0]->id .'&Itemid='. $Itemid );

Replace the URL with the address of the page you want to send people to. Check out an example by sending us a quick email.

Hot Property

Look in components/com_hotproperty/hotproperty.php. You'll need to change lines 527 to 531. Simply look for the code repeated three times.

Replace the URL with the address of the page you want to send people to.

Community Builder

It has a setting that allows you to send first-time registered users to a specific page.

Go to Components >> Community Builder Configuration >> Registration >> URL for first login visit

Further Reading

• Average Conversion Rates
• Ideas for tracking blog conversions from SEOMoz
• Landing page analysis by Copyblogger