Compass Designs .net

Over the last week I have been talking (How to Track Offsite Links for Google Goals in Joomla) about how to use Google Analytics for your Joomla Joomla site to better track conversions, marketing efforts, and the usability of your site.

Allowing users to register at a Joomla site is very very common. It also makes a great goal to track. Discovering the URL to use in the funnel path is a little tricky, as there is a confirmation email involved. When users register on a Joomla Joomla 1.5 site, they get a confirmation email with a link to click on. This is the URL you need to use as the goal URL.

But for your continuing Google happiness, here is the inside scoop on how to do this, whatever your site, this URL is always the same, and here it is.

Google Goals. Love 'em, use 'em, make business decisions based on them.

If you didn't know what a "Google goal" is, its a feature of Google Analytics. It allows you to set up a specific and discrete goal for something on your website. Examples might be:

• Making a purchase
• Downloading a white paper
• Filling out a contact form
• Downloading a file

I'd thought I'd share some help I passed onto students from the Web 2.0 Marketing with Joomla Graduate Course. The class are developing goals for their case study websites and pondering how best to set them up.

/boggle

If you haven't noticed, there has been HUGE change in Google's search results. The weird "google wonder wheel" is the least of it.

Last week I wrote a post, Did Stallman Say Gmail is Worse than Stupidity where I noted that Stallman had made some interesting comments about the dangers (as he saw them) of running SaaS.

I just came across another post on GigaOM that pointed out an interesting aspect I had never thought of. The post asserted that the ability to run software is perhaps more important than having the code in your hands.

Some Joomla Joomla developers were chatting about the possibility of running Joomla on server clouds and someone posted a link to a fascinating post on Richard Stallman on the topic. I read his comments, then re-read them... and then my mind boggled a bit more, and I had to re-read a third time.

Did he just say Gmail is stupidity that is worse than stupidity?

I noticed a recent post on Arno Zijlstra's new blog about duplicate titles. He was linking to a recent post from Google where it was said that duplicate content was dead and buried and not an issue.

Unfortunately, I rather think the point might be being missed by everyone.