I’ve always believed that technology, like the web, should be an enabler. It should make things easier, not harder.

When I research and shop online, I have reasonable, but elevated, expectations. I expect that the process of learning about a product or service and making a purchase will be as easy as it is in person or over the phone. I place extra emphasis on this because I have two children and extra-curricular activities; so most of my online shopping takes place in the wee hours of the night.

As a teenager, I remember lining up for concert tickets the night before they went on sale. A lot of fun for a teenager, but I’m much happier to pick and choose my tickets online. Yet, because most ticket sales go through TicketMaster ™, or are self served via Tickets.com or other solutions, it’s usually is a disappointing experience.

Occasionally, my wife and I will make it to a concert, but mostly we purchase tickets to sporting events. Baseball, in particular, is an event where the guy sitting across the aisle from you could be paying $20 less per ticket. I only care about my view and like to compare many options, something that most ticket services make very difficult online.

For Example: Looking for tickets for my beloved Cubbies, seating options include only Best Available (Read: Most expensive.) or you can pick a section that has availability for your game of choice. After choosing a section and entering the security image code, your tickets are displayed and the problems begin:

1. You are only shown one option in that section. Why not give 4-5 best options in the section that you selected? All seats in a section are not created equal!

2. To request different seats you have to start over! You have to select a section, enter the security code again, etc. and when you get to the new ticket selection, your other options are gone. Why can’t you just click on the displayed seating chart? Why can’t they follow Amazon’s Lead by offering additional recommendations: “If you like Terrace Reserved, you may also like these wonderful bleacher seats?” Or better yet, multiple seats in every section — have everything available on one page!

What’s most frustrating to me is that if I was purchasing in person or over the phone, the rep would quickly offer many available options. Why would you want your website to make it harder for your customers to do business with you?

Enter StubHub. StubHub is a ticket reselling marketplace that was acquired by eBay last year. I had the pleasure of using StubHub to look for tickets to a sold out game that I wanted to attend.

StubHub is what online ticket buying should be:

Select the event, select buy or sell and all available tickets are displayed. Results are sortable by quantity, section, row and price. And perhaps the best innovation, an interactive seating chart. As you rollover sections at your venue, the number of tickets and price range are displayed for each section and you can even turn on and off individual sections on the map.

I hope that the entrenched players learn something from StubHub and make online ticket buying what it should be – Easy.

We have all been hearing the rumblings about mobile ads for the past few years, but where is mobile advertising today? Has this new channel really started to show its true potential as a viable source of traffic yet?

Whether texting, looking up the basketball scores or scanning the latest news, we are all spending more and more time on our phones. Many professionals have now traded their regular mobiles for the latest version, high-tech PDAs. So is it possible that we have been hit with advertisements and just not seen them?

Currently a $1-billion dollar marketing channel, accounting for just .2% of all advertising, EMarketer is now estimating mobile ad spend to grow to over $19 billion in just four years!

This means that the channel is really an un-tapped area for many merchants and should be tested now, while costs are just a fraction of ‘traditional’ Internet ads. Advertisers can choose to create specific mobile campaigns that target a certain demographic, just as you can with search. Further, search engines continue to grow their mobile capabilities, including mapping, GPS, and advertisement all in one!

As an SEM client strategist of several lead generation clients, I often get caught up in the hustle and bustle of trying to generate as many leads as possible and finding the best method of tracking those leads. Tools such as Google Analytics have made the process a lot easier by embedding a tracking code in the source code of every page. The code tracks the user throughout the site and allows the marketer to see: the user’s activity, how long they spent on the site, how many pages of the site they viewed before exiting, what geographic location the visitor is in, and of course who converts by completing a “goal” on the site. Typically, the main “goal” for lead generation sites, is getting the visitor to fill out some sort of “Contact Us” or “Request More Information” form. This is an easy method to track because we can code the form and set up the confirmation page as a “goal” within the Google Analytics interface.

That being said, a lot of people visit sites to get a phone number because they would prefer to talk to someone directly. As you can imagine, tracking a phone call is not as easy as tracking an online form, but it is doable. Here are some methods to consider if tracking your phone calls would be of value to you.

1. Unique Phone Numbers - If you are participating in CPC campaigns, send the traffic to a landing page that has a unique phone number. If you have access to several unique phone numbers, a step further would be to allocate one unique phone number per search engine that you are running traffic in. This will allow you to effectively track phone calls that are coming from Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.
2. Pay For Call - There are several vendors that offer a Pay for Call Service. Superpages & Ingenio are two in particular that will give you a unique phone number to use for your ad/listing.
3. Test Unique Phone Number in Ad Copy- If you have a unique phone number, you can test it within the ad copy displayed on a search engine results page. It might slow down the number of clicks, but would be a good way to see who chooses to call instead of going to the site for more information.

Phone calls can be a valid source of leads, and often the most qualified. Most companies are very proud and confident in the product and/or service that they are offering. Therefore, most feel that if someone is interested enough to call about the product and/or service, they can definitely be sold from speaking with someone directly. The main obstacle from receiving phone leads, is the ability to track where the leads came from. Many companies participate in multi-media marketing plans such as: television, radio, print, direct mail, online, etc. Therefore, unless the sales rep specifically asks the individual where they “heard about the company”, there is no way of knowing where the lead truly came from. That being said, if you test one of the three methods mentioned above, you will potentially gain some insight into the source of your phone leads.