Ecommerce Links: February 2012

Shortest month but not short on great content. It was hard to narrow it down to 10 this week. Enjoy!

• We've discussed the power of social proof on Get Elastic before, KISSmetrics explains how you can use social proof for paid search campaigns.

• So much great content is available for free online, but how can digital content producers monetize their hard work? Econsultancy shares 5 emerging revenue strategies for media and publishing.

• No matter what's your business, you need to read online form optimization: 3 simple form problems to fix.

• Find out how to prepare your AdWords account for enhanced sitelinks. Why? "We know from Google that even the use of traditional sitelinks provides an average 30% increase in ad clickthrough rates, and the hope is that the increase from Enhanced Sitelinks will be even better."

• Did you know flexible ID fields can help forgetful users log in?

• Fine tune your SEO by weeding out poor performing keywords with Google Analytics. Hint: you can use this strategy with other analytics packages too.

• Kindle Fire conversion rates are worse on the Kindle Fire than the iPhone. You read that right, the iPhone. You may consider excluding these devices from your paid search and display campaigns. This also reminds us that both users of devices and the form factors of devices can vary so greatly, it can have impact on advertising and likely ecommerce conversion rates.

• We know online video is hot and can have a dramatic impact on conversion rates. But are you making these common video production mistakes?

• Curious how to monitor which social networks your visitors are logged into with Google Analytics? <-- Check out this post. Why would you care? One reason is judging how helpful 3rd party authentication could be for your site (alternative to log in).

• No! Not another Pinterest post! Could copyright complaints de-pin the social media darling?

We also have HUGE news at Elastic Path this week, we've launched our Digital Commerce Engine, which includes an industry-first "intelligent API" for selling digital goods across multiple touchpoints. Unlike traditional commerce APIs, which expose the entire platform, the intelligent API exposes services as "lego blocks," doing the heavy-lifting for developers and enabling apps to be built in a fraction of the time.