I'll brand you today for a conversion on Tuesday...

Welcome to 2009, post-click marketers!

As the first tip of the New Year, consider Matt Greitzer’s Search Insider column from a couple of days ago, Just One Opportunity for 2009. Matt is the head search guru at Razorfish, and if he could offer only one piece of advice to search marketers for the year ahead, it would be this: redefine success metrics by paying more attention to branding and other indirect effects of your online marketing.

We’ve settled squarely on directly measured, Web-based response metrics (sales, leads, revenue, etc.) as the primary indicator of value. And these metrics have a profound influence on everything from our optimization decisions to segmentation and targeting to budgeting to internal and external resourcing against the search opportunity.

What we’ve seen in the last quarter of 2008, however, is that every metric, whether derived from search, banner media, offline advertising, or “other”, is up for debate as marketers scrutinize their investments like never before.

Matt believes that marketers should incorporate three other dimensions into thinking about ROI:

First and foremost, we should factor in value outside of the online order process.

Second, we should push incessantly for brand awareness, message association and brand favorability metrics as a factor in evaluating search marketing success.

And third, we should quantify and include into our success metrics the opportunity costs of not participating in the search landscape, or segments therein.

A lot of Matt’s arguments extend quite logically into the landing pages and post-click marketing experiences associated with the click-throughs from these advertising sources. This is a big part of what I was getting at with my post a few weeks ago: Optimizing yourself out of a brand.

To be sure, we all want a higher conversion rate in our online marketing. That should remain as the primary metric of success, especially in post-click marketing programs. However, even if someone does not convert immediately on a particular landing page, we still want their brand experience to be a positive one — setting up the opportunity for a conversion in the future.