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Brian Bond at GrokDotCom looks at a Pew Internet Life Study that says e-commerce is still too complicated for most customers. As Bond writes, “One thing jumped right out: Across the board, the percentage of those surveyed who had negative things to say about shopping online was higher among older shoppers, with one exception. Can you guess? ‘Online shopping is still too complicated…it’s a sentiment evidently shared by 18 year olds and 65+ year olds equally.”

Well, that sucks, huh?

For the big guys, sure. But not necessarily for you. Here’s why.

One place businesses like yours have the opportunity to excel is in using your website - and you do have a website, right? - to drive customers into your store. Amazon’s ecommerce superiority doesn’t do them much good once you get customers to come to you. In fact, Borders is trying it with their new website, including features such as ship to store - very cool and very fitting for what they’re trying to accomplish as a brand - to drive customers to retail locations. According to one article, “[Borders’] web presence is part of its strategy to help bring online shoppers into its stores and encourage its in-store shoppers to check out the Web site — for information and entertainment, as well as purchases.” Borders’ bookshelf feature plays to their strengths as a recommender of books and also emulates that in-store feel.

For some businesses, such a strategy may not work. For instance, if you’re selling low-cost, high-volume commodity items, it’s unlikely that you’ll get folks to drive cross-town to see you. But, for many others, getting customers into your store may be the first step in your conversion cycle. And that’s a very Good Thing.

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Quick Friday link love this week, folks, whilst playing tourist in London. Enjoy and see you next week:

• Linda Bustos interviews Chris Brucia on Amazon’s blog strategy
• In keeping with our social theme of the past few days, Mike Moran says “Social Media Requires Having Something to Say”
• And, I don’t know about you, but my week’s never complete without legal action. SEOmoz takes a look at DSW suing Zappos.com for trademark infringement over affiliates’ review sites

Catch you next week.

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During our discussions over the last couple weeks about whether social marketing is ready for business, I mentioned how you can “…test the viability of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, widgets or what-have-for very low cost.” Seems like at least one political candidate understands this. Mack Collier on Twitter pointed us to an example (originally pointed out by @tawnypress) of Barack Obama using LinkedIn to engage in dialogue with constituents. This is more than just having a profile. They’re actively asking people what they think - and have gotten over 2,500 responses to date. Let’s hope the campaign listens.

Admittedly, these techniques may work better for a politician than other brands, in that most politicians are (at least so far as we can tell), real people. But, since social is about real people, you must have “brand ambassadors” or “evangelists” or just regular, old “customer service folks” (do you really have people in your business not in “customer service”?!?), y’know, real people, interacting with your customers like this. Whether your goal is to be a social marker or sell within social networks, you’ll never do it as a faceless entity. Sure, there are some risks. Maybe your return on investment will fall short of your goal. Maybe your company ambassador will become more famous than your brand.

Maybe you should be so lucky to have that happen.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and mingle, people.

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Yesterday, we started looking at how to build the right metric for your marketing. We’d gotten as far as tracking monthly unique visitors by typed/referred domain.

Throughout the process, we had made a number of assumptions, such as what type of URL would get the best results and what duration to track unique visitors. Once you’ve made these types of decisions, move on. Debate your assumptions until your team fully understands the pros and cons of each assumption. But, unless you’ve got better options, some tracking is better than none. From this point forward, you will be tracking the trends of your metrics and validating that the trend correlates to business results. You may find better ways to correlate later. But don’t change the underlying data if you can help it. As long as you’re comparing apples to apples, it doesn’t much matter if the apples are rotten.

OK, now back to our case study. So, what happened next?

To this point in the process, we already knew how we were going to track awareness of the media, by type. What we needed now was a way to track that awareness through to purchase.

Fortunately, this proved relatively easy. When each customer came to our landing page, the site placed a cookie - a small data file containing some distinct identifiers - into their browser. One of those identifiers was a key that told us their source ID - that they’d seen the landing page and whether they’d come from the URL for the billboard or from the print media. The problem was that our e-commerce engine didn’t have a database field for that value. The solution: a simple database that captured both the order number and the source ID. Finally, we made sure to capture information such as name, address, and email address on all purchases, to see if these were new customers or matched individuals already in our database.

To complete the picture, the team developed a weekly dashboard showing the identified metrics:

• Monthly unique visitors, by source ID (remember, these told us whether the customer saw the billboard or the print advertisement)
• Net change in monthly unique visitors from the prior week (later versions of the test incorporated year-over-year, once enough data existed)
• Sales generated, by source ID
• Net change in sales
• Ratio of sales to unique visitors, by source ID (aka “conversion rate”)
• Net change in conversion

That’s it. At a glance, we had a good sense of which media type brought in both prospects and customers, and the change in those numbers over time.

More important, we were able to make changes to the landing page and the ad copy over time to improve the capture rates for both media, increasing sales among a new customer group. And that’s really why having the right metric makes all the difference.

How did we match up to the 7 keys of successful metrics? Quite well. Clearly, our dashboard was tied to business results and were actionable. They also were timely, trended, segmented and meaningful. They also showed us precisely what we wanted to know. And that’s a good day’s work.

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A comment from thinks reader Robin the other day asked how to measure adoption of a new program. In fact, Robin’s comment gets to the heart of the matter for many people new to online marketing: how do you choose the right metric for your marketing efforts? While thinks has looked at the keys to successful web metrics before, today we’re going to take a look at one specific case for how to build the right metrics for your marketing.

First, you’ve got to start with the business goal. A metric unrelated to your business goal is, put simply, useless. In this case, the goal was to compare the effectiveness of print and outdoor advertising (billboards, mostly) among specific demographic segments in several markets. This might sound complex, but it’s really asking some very simple questions:

1. Did customers see the advertising?
2. Did one type of media drive a better response than another?

So, we were trying to count:

That’s it.

That outline provided the basis for the metrics we’d develop. Anything that didn’t measure those three factors didn’t matter. Here’s what we did.

First, we started with how to count the number of people who saw the advertising. In this case, we were marketing to Spanish-speaking customers, which required us to develop a unique Spanish-language landing page. Since we wanted to ensure the page design didn’t influence results, we knew all traffic would have to go to the same page. There are ways to track the influence of those differences, but for a limited duration, low budget test, that was overkill.

If we wanted to know how often those people came, we could look at visits to the page or possibly page views. But our goal was to see how many people we reached. The best metric to track the number of people you reach is unique visitor counts. As you’re about to see, it won’t tell you everything. But it will start you on the right path. Since the test was due to run for several months, and since we knew our typical sales window was three weeks, we decided tracking monthly unique visitors provided the best picture. Weekly or daily counts would have been too short and over-counted traffic. Quarterly or annual counts would have been too long a period and under-counted the results. Just like Goldilocks’ porridge, monthly was just right.

But deciding on unique visitor counts was just the starting point. Since the media would appear in both print and outdoor, we wanted to segment the customers to see which type of media drove traffic. Even though all traffic was going to the same landing page, there’s no need to use the same URL for both. In fact, using different URL’s allowed us to track where customers saw the media. We opted to use a “vanity URL” - a domain name specific to the campaign - each place we ran media, one for print, another for billboards.

While there is nothing wrong with using URL’s like www.example.com/media1 and www.example.com/media2 in your marketing - and there are many good reasons to do so - in this case there was value in having distinct domains for each media channel. First, the campaign was in Spanish. We felt having the domain name appear as www.ejemplo.com (that’s “example” in Spanish) was more likely to reassure our customers than www.example.com/página. Second, we wanted to know whether billboards or print were driving the traffic. Customers who saw our brand may have simply gone to our traditional domain. That’s almost always a Good Thing, but for purposes of this test, wouldn’t tell us what we wanted to know. Keeping the domains custom and exclusive to the media type increased the likelihood that the customer had seen, and was reacting to, that specific medium. So, by using the URL ejemplo-uno.com (not the actual domain) for billboards and ejemplo-dos.com in print media, we could then track which medium the customer had seen. This changed our metric to monthly unique visitors by typed/referred domain.

Notice throughout this how the design of the tracking influenced the design of the campaign and vice versa. When planning for your campaigns, you also must plan for what you’re looking to measure. Almost like Murphy’s Law, ignoring what you’re trying to track while building your campaign tactics guarantees you won’t have the data later to support your efforts.

At this point, we had enough information to begin tracking how many people acted on the ads. But awareness isn’t a goal. Revenue is. Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at how the team was able to track the efficiency of the different media types and how that grew revenues.

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Great comment the other day from John Johansen on the discussion of when marketing becomes sales. John talks about “…the dichotomy of the social media focus on authentic content and conversations that don’t include marketing and the ease of using these channels for sales…”

He then goes on to ask, “Beyond just the blurring of sales and marketing, how do companies engage in authentic discussion with their audiences while at the same time looking to include their call to action that will lead those audiences towards a sale?”

It’s an interesting question, but a loaded one. Here’s why. Somewhere along the way, we’ve all come to believe the following:

Sales and marketing doesn’t represent authentic dialogue with our customers.

Why is that? Why can’t social channels allow for sales and marketing? Social channels allow for more honest dialogue, not less. The problem in John’s question is that he’s really asking, “How do companies use these tools when they have traditionally sold to people by pretending to be their friend?”

They can’t.

As this video shows, the rules of the game have changed.

For too long, marketers have built their promise around the idea that they’re here to be a friend, a pal, a trusted resource. Social channels require that you actually be that or stop pretending.

And that’s a very good thing.

After all, sometimes, we’re actually here to sell things.

What surprises many companies is that customers will often agree to let you.

@delloutlet - which Dell only uses to sell discounted, refurbished inventory - has over 1,200 followers on Twitter, more than “authentic person” (and good guy), @richardatDELL - and more than any other Dell business persona that I’m aware. HR Block has over 800 fans on Facebook. You might think, “‘Fans’ of a tax preparation company?!? For real?!?” Yes. For real.

Why do these - supposedly inauthentic - companies or marketing initiatives capture attention? Because they’re honest about why they’re there. They don’t hide behind fake personas. Notice, none of these pretend to be your friend. They’re authentically providing a service or offering you a sale, most likely information you can get somewhere else. But by going where their customers are and providing an authentic presence, they’re finding success.

So, really, the question is, when you use social tools, what’s your reason for being there? And do you authentically tell customers why you’re there or are you trying to hide the fact you’re selling something?

All right, Big Thinkers. Your turn. Tell us how you’re using social tools to grow your business in the comments below.

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