5 Tricks to Capture Additional User Data in Joomla Forms

Hey Joomlers, in our previous post we have discussed how to create AWeber Subscribe Form in Joomla with the help of Convert Forms and increase your mailing list. Today, we are going to discuss one more Convert Forms hack to get more details about your visitor during form submission.

As we all know it is easy to capture any detail from any user by just adding a single field in your contact form. However, this is not always enough. If you need more information like where the user came from, the page URL, or want to capture the logged in user's Name or Email address automatically, it can be a little bit tricky.

Looking for capturing additional data like page URLs, referring source or even device type in your #Joomla forms? Checkout these easy 5 tricks. Click to Tweet

Hopefully, all of these things can be tracked efficiently with the help of Convert Forms Smart Tags.

What is a Smart Tag?

A Smart Tag is a small piece of code which, when used for notifications or form fields, provides you valuable information about almost everything related to the moment when your form was submitted.

Let's see 5 popular and widely-used cases to capture additional data in your Joomla forms.

1. Capture Page URL and Page Title

There might be several reasons why you want to know the Page URL or Page Title where the submission take place from. The most common reason is that there's a single form is used on several pages and you want to know which page is performing better. So, here is how you can capture Page additional information with the help of Smart Tags.

Steps

1. Add a hidden field to your form
2. Go to the Field settings, in the Default Value option click on the small icon to open the Smart Tags box.
3. Search for the {page.title} or {url} Smart Tags and click to add it

Now when a user submits a form, you will be able to see the page where the form is submitted.

2. Capture Joomla Logged in User Data

It will bother a logged in user to fill his essential details if he is submitting any form. So for the better user experience, you can capture all the Joomla Logged in user data like ID, First Name, Last Name, Email, Login name or even the User Groups.

If the user is not logged in while using Convert Forms, Smart Tag will return nothing. So it will work only when the user will be logged in.

Steps

1. Add a hidden field or a text field to the form (If you want the field to be visible)
2. Go to the Field settings, in the Default Value option click on the small icon to open the Smart Tags box.
3. In the Smart Tags Box go the Joomla tab and add any user related tag such as {user.id}, {user.login}, {user.email} e.t.c

This is how you can capture all the information of Logged in user.

3. Capture User Device Type or Browser Name

Sometimes you want to know what browser or device your visitor is using to browse your website. This is a little bit complex task, but Convert Forms Smart Tags makes it easy.

Steps

1. Add a hidden field to the form
2. Go to the Field settings, in the Default Value option click on the small icon to open the Smart Tags box.
3. To capture the Device type or the Browser name add the {client.device} or {client.browser} tags respectively.

4. Capture the Joomla site URL or Name

Sometimes there are chances that you are using Convert Forms on multiple sites to capture the leads. So when a leads lands to your inbox, you want to know the name and URL of the site it comes from.

Naturally, it can be a little complex, but with the help of Convert Forms Smart Tags, it's effortless to capture Joomla site data.

Steps

1. Add a hidden field to the form
2. Go to the Field settings, in the Default Value option click on the small icon to open the Smart Tags box.
3. To capture the Site Name or the Site URL add the {site.name} or {site.url} tags respectively.

Apart from the Site name and Site URL, you can also capture the Site email (As set in the Global configuration page) as well.

5. Capture the Referring source URL

It is important to know the referrer of your lead especially when you are running an Ad Campaign or affiliate program. If you are getting the referrer URLs of your lead, you can measure the performance of your campaign and decide whether you should keep it running or not.

Steps

1. Add a hidden field to the form
2. Go to the Field settings, in the Default Value option click on the small icon to open the Smart Tags box.
3. Search for the {referrer} Smart Tag and click to add it.

There’s even more data to capture

Apart from these, you can capture much more information as per your requirements. Here are some other popular, important Smart Tags you can also use:

• Page path {url.path}
• Page language code {page.lang}
• Page meta description {page.desc}
• Visitor Operating system {client.os}
• Visitor user agent string {client.useragent}
• Date {date}
• Time {time}
• Query String {querystring.YOUR_KEY}

You can find detailed information about the Smart Tags usage in the Smart Tags documentation page.