Marc wrote to me:

Hi,

I would like to know if I can use Metamod for:

(1) Showing a customized page based on a user that come from a Google Ad
(2) Showing a customized page based on a user that chose one option from a form on another Joomla website page.

(1) Google adwords landing pages: There are lots of ways you could approach this. One way would be to set up a hidden menu and put an article onto that page. Then you can assign modules onto that page in the normal way, and use the URL of that page as the one that you give to Google as the landing page for that adwords campaign. This doesn't require MetaMod.

Another way of doing it is this: if you want adwords to send people to the front page (or any particular public page) of your site, then you might be able to set up a MetaMod on that page that is able to detect whether the "referrer" was adwords. However I don't know for sure if this is possible (I haven't used adwords myself, and I don't know if incoming requests from adwords have a particular referrer string).

I think most sites with adwords set up special landing pages so that they can track exactly who is coming in and what they are looking at.

(2) It's easy to set up MetaMod to respond to form elements.

On the "sending" page (with the form on it) you might have a dropdown with html element name "type", and values "1", "2" and "3".

On the "landing" page you set up a MetaMod with a rule like this:

$type = JRequest::getInt('type',1,'GET');
if ($type == 1) return 101;
if ($type == 2) return 102;
if ($type == 3) return 103;
...

(replace 101, 102 and 103 with the module ids of the modules you want to display for each of the dropdown values on the sending page).

If your form is a "POST" form, then replace 'GET' with 'POST' in the script above.