Storebuilder Blog - Site Building

Spent Sunday evening viewing some of the weeks drama recorded on the V+ box.

"In treatment" on Sky One is superb and it makes you wonder why we can't make great drama like this. Instead of killing off shows like "The Bill" which is half decent, making thoughtful drama like this would surely solve ITV's woes. As it is Sky is stealing a march on everybody with it's importation of good, quality USA drama.

"Criminal Justice" was slow and plodding at times and should have been a three parter instead of the lengthy five but was decent enough stuff.

"House" Again on Sky One continues to be brilliant.

And so I came in on Monday morning to a mailbox brimming with robot messages from the joomla sites and it's time to do something about it.

The problem with robots and spammers in general, is that the more successful your site becomes and the more traffic it gets, the more the spammers target it and so you can quickly get engulfed in robot email. The most common one is the robot that is designed to register itself on your joomla site supposedly so that the author can come back at a later date and do some comment spamming.

The answer is to use a captcha service which displays a graphical representation of letters and numbers or words and figures, or a combination of both and asks the user to type them in so you know it's a human (or at least a human robot) that's doing the registering.

The simplest way that I've found to implement this is to use this component from Alhaplug.com which installs in seconds and then add the security images component which does the background stuff. There are also several third party contact forms which use the security images component as the core for an anti spam contact form.

Once you've got your anti spam registration form up and working you can then place the standard login module on the home page and start collecting registrations.

So what's the difference between building a mailing list and accepting site registrations?

The big drawback with joomla is that at this moment in time there is no decent forum solution. You either have to have a joomla registration AND a Vbulletin login or settle for one of the third party joomla forums the best of which is probably Agora.

The problem for anyone serious about building up a forum is that if you go with a third party joomla forum, once the developers fall behind with the software development or fail to keep up with the releases, the whole of your joomla development can come to a standstill.

However that isn't to say that it's not going to change in the future and wordpress is no better off in this regard.

By asking people to register on your site you are leaving all of your avenues open. Once new opportunities come along you can leverage your user base in a way that using a mailing list simply can't do.

Either way, by shoring up your joomla installation and preventing casual spammers and robots from joining your party you'll get a good idea of how effective your content is at persuading visitors to sign up.

In addition to this the main reason for wanting a joomla registration as opposed to an easier mailing list sign up is that you can define the registration as a "goal" in google analytics.

How to do it:

So now that we've shored up our registration module and done as much as we can to prevent spammers and robots from using the registration form, how do we track registrations as a goal in google analytics?

Well, clearly we can't use the simple register page as many people may not follow the whole process through and we'll get false registrations. So we need to use the link that get's sent out in the registration email as the goal setter.

http://www.yoursite.co.uk/index.php?option=com_alpharegistration&task=activate&activation=828e463ce9ed15fb663df8fbdcb705ba

This bit 828e463ce9ed15fb663df8fbdcb705ba is the unique identifier. It tells joomla which account to activate so we need to remove this from the URL we use so it looks like this:

http://www.yoursite.co.uk/index.php?option=com_alpharegistration&task=activate&activation=

Now, everytime the link get's clicked in the registration email an account get's activated and we can record it as a goal.

Essentially you are using "head match" as the identifier as explained in the google help:

Head Match: If your website has dynamically generated content, use the Head Match filter and leave out the unique values.

For example, if the URL for a particular user is http://www.example.co.uk/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=9982251615 but the 'id' varies for every other user, enter http://www.example.co.uk/checkout.cgi?page=1 and select Head Match as your Match Type.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There you have it: A spammer and robot protected sign up form with registrations recorded in google analytics as a goal.

What use is recording registrations as a goal?

Every action on your website is worth money. Whether a user registration or a click on a specified link. Recording the amount of registrations will give you an idea at the very simplest of say, number of registrations per 1000 pageviews. Once you know that figure your overall goal is to reduce the factor down so that the amount of registrations per 1000 pageviews starts to climb.

If you haven't already, head on over to Highprofits where you can put these ideas into action and start making some money.

 

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