As we noted last week, 2008 has been a breakthrough year for post-click marketing.

To round out the year, Chris Golec, the CEO of Demandbase, just wrote an article for today’s Online Media Daily titled Click to Close: How Marketers Are Supercharging Online Campaigns. Chris notes that of the billions of online ad dollars spent in B2B to drive clicks, some 98% of that traffic goes “unrealized”.

Basically, what do marketers do after the click? Fortunately, there is an emerging cottage industry focused on this very issue, picking up where the click leaves off. Welcome to the wonderful world of post-click marketing.

The biggest mistake companies make is to think the end goal of an online campaign is to drive traffic to a site. Click-throughs are an important metric, but traffic alone won’t bring home the proverbial bacon for most companies. Savvy customers now want a personalized experience — they want to know that you can fulfill their needs, yet they are not likely to fill out lengthy surveys to help show you the way.

It’s interesting to note that the term “post-click marketing” is taking on several different meanings — or, more accurately, several different sub-categories:

• Landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites and their optimization, what we focus on here at ion — and what I primarily intended when I coined the term post-click marketing in 2005.

• Identification, filtering and tracking of site visitors, such as what Demandbase does, which can enable light personalization of one’s core web site accordingly.

• Lead nurturing after a respondent has been converted, which certainly happens after the initial click, but since it also happens after the initial conversion, I think of this more as post-conversion marketing.

These are not mutually exclusive — in fact, they’re highly complementary. All of them contribute to the same benefit:

More selling opportunities and higher marketing ROI.