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.

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.

1. If you haven’t already, get on top of the post-click marketing stage of your online marketing funnel.

2. Do a competitive benchmark of the other firms in your space, from advertising through post-click. Commit to becoming best-in-class.

3. Make search marketing continuity a rallying mission. If you haven’t already, put together a message match message map — the exercise alone will reveal new opportunities.

4. Discover at least three new attractive segments in your audience that can be targeted specifically with Long Tail marketing.

5. Experiment with at least three interactive widgets or Flash objects to increase the engagement and utility of select landing pages in your portfolio.

6. Build at least three landing pages specifically for mobile devices — all those millions of iPhones and Blackberries are attached to potential customers, eager to be engaged on the go.

7. Double your conversion rate — yes, double it — by improving user experience after the click.

Of course, just like you might hire a personal trainer at the gym to help with some of those other, mundane resolutions, please know that our team of post-click professionals would be delighted to help you achieve any or all of these goals in the year ahead.

Have a safe Happy New Year!

‘Twas the moment of click-through, and all through the site
All the pages were crafted to bring visitors delight
The images were placed in the layout with care
Along with the headlines that perfectly paired

The tracking codes were nestled, all snug in the page
To measure performance (that’s what we do in this age)
The variations were ready for a good A/B test
To discover which versions would convert people best

Landing pages were added to match ads even more
Knowing the secret to a great quality score
“Now Flash, now widgets”, the marketer cried
Improving engagement by wow’ing their eyes

Respondents were segmented with a choice and a click
Receiving the right content and offers right quick
Behaviors were noted so the whole team could learn
How to do even better when respondents return

And as the traffic arrived, through the funnel it went
From pre-click to post-click to money well spent
How the dashboard twinkled as the conversion rate soared
And the marketer knew there’d be joy on the Board

As the conversion rate multiplied, the marketer winked
“This post-click marketing rocks, don’t you think?”
And you could hear her exclaim as she drove out of sight
“Happy click-throughs to all, and to all a good night!”

We were delighted to see triple-digit growth in our customer base, with millions and millions of respondents being served world-class landing experiences in well-managed post-click campaigns. Collectively, our customers launched thousands of landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites.

Of course, it’s not just the quantity, it’s the quality: our “lead gen” clients continue to convert at over 4X the industry average — wrapping up Q4 with a stunning 14.6% conversion rate. Our transactional and e-commerce clients haven’t been too shabby either, with better than a 2X lead over the industry average.

Our software-as-a-service (SaaS) model freed our customers from IT worries, while delivering a rock-solid 99.997% uptime across our service (including scheduled maintenance!). With a triple-digit investment in our infrastructure and reliability/redundancy this year, we’re committed to keeping SaaS as an “IT-free, no worries” solution for marketers.

It was a year of innovative ideas for making landing pages more engaging and effective — and delivering the capabilities to execute them — including:

• dynamic Flash objects
• social networking features
• reusable, interactive widgets
• iPhone-specific landing experiences

In August, SES San Jose became the first industry show to have a dedicated post-click marketing session, where Tom Leung of Google began his presentation by proclaiming, “Google loves post-click marketing!” Thank you, Tom, we love you too.

In September, Compete became one of the first independent third-party research groups to publish an objective analysis of the difference post-click marketing can make. Their report: best-in-class post-click marketing generates 5X the ROI in online marketing.

This year our customers also received industry acclaim for their post-click marketing success stories. The New England Journal of Medicine presented at the post-click marketing session at SES San Jose. Overland Storage presented at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Lead Gen Summit in both Boston and San Francisco. And American Greetings presented their case study at SES Chicago earier this month (see ClickZ’s summary, How Agile Marketing Pays Off). Kudos!

And although most of our customers like to keep their results secret — outsized conversion rates are, indeed, a tremendous competitive advantage — Expand Media, MarketingProfs, and Millennium Bankcard were all kind enough to share their success stories in new cases studies for us this year.

And I’ve barely scratched the surface of the year’s events…

But the conclusion is unmistakable: it’s been a wonderful year. Thank you to everyone who has contributed, supported, and participated with us in the post-click marketing movement. Happy holidays, and best wishes for the New Year.

Here’s to 2009 being even more “The Year of Post-Click Marketing”.

By subsequently targeting the right content to the right audience, based on that choice, marketers can increase their conversion rate and learn more about their audience, earlier in the funnel.

Some old-school search marketers may object to this 2-step landing page methodology on principle, in the [mistaken] belief that respondents don’t like to click. If you ask people to take an extra step, you will lose more of them, so conventional wisdom goes.

However, that’s not necessarily true. Fewer steps may be better — other things being equal. But other things rarely are.

The underlying dynamic here is that respondents don’t like to waste time or effort. If an extra click actually saves them time, by quickly navigating them to the content that’s most relevant to their needs — if you can properly set those expectations and then fulfill them — many will indeed make that click.

It’s about keeping people in a flow that serves their interests.

Earlier this week, Cory Treffiletti wrote a great article on MediaPost, More Agency Prescriptions: Retrench, Fix Process and Elevate to Strategy, that hones in on this issue.

The last issue is agency value and compensation models. This is the most difficult but probably the most important. As it stands right now, most agencies are compensated on the basis of doing what they do best, which is spending money. Spending is not the most important component of a media strategy anymore. There are far too many other things you should be doing first (with the exception of search, which is still always the first thing to do).

Agencies are not, for the most part, compensated for strategic thinking. They are still mostly compensated by media commissions. I know, I know. I’ll be getting a deluge of responses from agency people telling me they get compensated on retainer and that commissions are old school, but either you’re lying or you’re overstating. Gross and net are still commonplace for agency business. The basis is still on media commission — and in most cases that commission is disturbingly low, around 3% to 4%.

There’s no better way to shift the discussion (and the value) from commissions on spend to the real reservoirs of core business dollars than to have an agency engage its full strategic and creative prowess in addressing the post-click marketing space for its clients.

As Cory points out, the current economic turbulence isn’t fun, but it’s a great opportunity to make important changes to business models in the marketing services business and prepare for the next wave of growth.

First was a conversation with David Szetela, PPC guru and frequent speaker at SES. He was talking about purchasing keyword/bid management tools for search marketing and was emphasizing the need for accurately tracking “attribution”. In this case, attribution means which ad — or ads — get credit for the conversion.

In search marketing, it can be tempting to view ads and their landing pages in a vacuum. Someone clicks on a specific ad, they convert on that specific page — then that ad and that landing page must be the winners. You should increase spend on them and reduce spend elsewhere.

But in the real world, of course, life can be more complicated. People may do multiple searches, at different stages in the buying funnel, from awareness to research to specific purchase intent. You may have had multiple ads and multiple landing pages that didn’t convert, yet their touch points with the prospect — and the (hopefully positive) brand impressions that they created — may very well have been an integral part of the marketing equation that eventually led to conversion on some later ad and landing page.

Microsoft made a lot of noise about this earlier this year with their engagement mapping model. If you “optimize away” those early ads and landing pages, you may actually reduce the overall effectiveness of your search marketing.

It’s an important point, and the bigger lesson here is that analytics by themselves rarely tell the entire story. You need to still use every channel and touchpoint you can to understand your customers and view analytics through the lens of customer empathy. Interpreting and explaining analytics is still a decidedly human enterprise that benefits from right-brained pattern recognition as much as left-brained quantification.

Brands are more than the sum of their clicks.

Which brings me to the second discussion, on the panel of Ad Copy Continuity Clinic. One of the audience members volunteered their ad associated with the phrase “downtown chicago hotels”. The volunteer was a marketer on behalf of the Palmer House — an elegant and historic Chicago property that is apparently under the Hilton umbrella.

There was some debate on the panel and in the room even about the ad itself, which had “Palmer House” as its headline. All the other ads on the page pretty much had “Downtown”, “Chicago”, and “Hotel” in their headlines, and a number of folks thought that “Palmer House” was an outlier. They said it as if it were a bad thing.

My opinion was exactly the opposite: in a bland sea of cookie-cutter corporate hotel brands and travel aggregators such as Expedia and Orbitz, “Palmer House” was a beautiful contrast — arguably without competition on the SERP — and extended a tantalizing brand promise of an experience, not just a commoditized box with beds and baths.

The second line of the ad promised “Our best rates. Guaranteed.” I’m not sure that’s the strongest point to make, less of a differentiator than characteristics such as timeless ambiance and legendary guests. But the big objection in the room was that “our” was a wasted filler word — it should be just boiled down to “Best rates. Guaranteed.” (The marketer actually changed it at the session, as the screen grab to the right reflects.)

Now that may be true, but at this point I was starting to feel that a rote set of rules — headline must have keyword, filler words must be removed, Og like fire, Og like shiny object — were being blanketed as a kind of search marketing homogenization. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for best practices and learning from experience, but when it comes to differentiating brands and experiences, homogenization is not the way to go. Maybe — just maybe — a more conversational tone in the ad copy, instead of purely staccato minimalism would help build that brand differentiation. Certainly worth testing in context.

The schism of opinions widened when we clicked through on the ad, which, unfortunately, simply went to the hotel’s home page, with no continuity about the best rate guarantee. We all agreed that a message matched landing page would be better. But the big difference of opinion was about the proposed content for such a landing page.

I actually loved the core content of the home page, a beautiful Flash carousel of interior and exterior photographs that truly captured the elegance and historic charm of the property. I’d absolutely carry that idea into the landing page, especially if the ads are differentiated from competitors by emphasizing the experience of the hotel.

Other folks, though, seemed to think the photos were a distraction from respondent goals: seeing the rates, checking availability, and quickly engaging into a booking engine. Yes, in theory, those are the ultimate optimized goals. But the “soft” marketing involved in building the brand for the respondent may be a critical — albeit far less quantifiable — step required for success here. You can’t automatically go leaping for the close without properly setting up the value proposition.

These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive objectives — brand-building and goal-enabling. A well-designed landing page — or multi-page conversion path — should be able to balance communicating the experience of the hotel while still providing actionable choices that keep continuity with any goal-oriented promises in the ad (i.e., best rates) and move the flow towards conversion.

Again, I’m not saying this experiential approach applies to every hotel. Frankly, if they were to decide to emphasize the Hilton branding of the hotel — which people might choose more on auto-pilot because they can trust it for a consistent, if not unique, travel experience — then prioritizing rates and availability probably makes more sense. This is where marketing judgment is invaluable. The experience of the landing page should maintain continuity not only with the immediate ad but with the implicit/explicit expectations associated with the brand.

Anyway, my two takeaways:

One: don’t optimize yourself out a brand.

Two: don’t let best practices equate to homogenization.

Or, put another way, good marketing and branding should leverage optimization, but they shouldn’t be dominated by it.

Anna had a great session on Tuesday with Tessa Fraser of American Greetings, with the two of them providing an in-depth case study of American Greetings’ post-click marketing efforts over the past year. Excellent insights, not just about tactical best practices, but also about the organizational challenges associated with aligning post-click with the rest of online marketing and how to overcome them.

Tessa had a follow-up interview with Webmaster Radio that’s worth tuning in for.

A few hours ago, I was on the Ad Copy Continuity panel, which I previewed in my post on search marketing continuity earlier this week. SES clinics, with on-the-fly audience volunteers, are like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get. Someone raises their hand, offers up a search phrase, you look at their ad, jump to their landing page, and dive right into analysis and discussion.

This time, we had a number of e-commerce volunteers, who buy ads associated with very specific products, and then drive respondents to category pages or search results pages on their own shopping engines. I understand why people do this — when you’re buying lots of Long Tail terms, it can be tempting to use existing pages so as to not have to specifically craft a landing page for each of a hundred (or a thousand, or ten thousand) different cases.

Unfortunately, this can lead to a lot of continuity problems, i.e., “message mismatch”. People search for something very specific, see an ad promising to fulfill that specific need — but then they end up on a page that is cluttered with lots of product choices, category navigation choices, ads for specials, email subscription call-to-actions, 800-number call-to-actions, returning user login options, etc. Through the eyes of the respondent it can be confusing and overwhelming, requiring them to do a lot of work to parse the page and find what they were after.

In an ideal world, you would have a landing page crafted to the very specific product being offered in the ad. Landing page management systems (such as, ahem, LiveBall) can make this practical — quickly produce new pages in a matter of minutes. Even if you don’t do this for all your Long Tail search terms, you certainly want to do it for your most popular ones, as dedicated, message-matched landing pages consistently deliver the highest improvements to conversion rates.

However, waaaay down the Long Tail, where that may not make sense, you might consider at least having a different version of templates of your category pages or search results pages that are optimized for use as landing pages. This means reducing the clutter, minimizing the navigation and extraneous calls-to-action, and perhaps elevating the visceral appeal with larger images and fewer product choices on that first page.

One other theme that came up repeatedly in our session was competitive differentiation in the search ads themselves. It’s very sobering to see your ad in the middle of 10 other competitive ads, all hawking wide selection, low price, etc. In those scenarios, we’re strong believers in testing copy ideas that are different than what everyone else is emphasizing.

For example, if your competitors are all about price and selection, what about emphasizing other factors that will help your ad stand out from the crowd:

• quality
• the particular market you serve (reseller vs. consumer, special niches, etc.)
• phenomenal customer service and/or technical support
• unique characteristics of your offering
• longevity of business
• brand/celebrity endorsements
• accompanying social community

Sure, sometimes you want to stick with the low price, wide selection message, but it can be worth testing alternative hypotheses.

However, as part of continuity, you must pay off the differentiated promise in your ad with the content on your landing page. If you’re going to emphasize quality in your ad, then you want to have left brain and right brain evidence of that quality on your landing page. (Note, any time you’re staking your brand on the quality of your products/services, remember that the quality of the design of your landing page itself is a proxy representation of your commitment to excellence.)

Thanks to everyone who participated in the session!

In preparing, I decided to sketch out a holistic view of search marketing continuity:

The essence is that continuity is a function of expectations, implicit and explicit combined.

Search Marketing Continuity: The Core Flow

Certainly the core of search marketing continuity is the alignment of the search query, the ad copy, and the landing page. These elements have a directional flow to them: the user types the query, then sees the ad, then clicks through to the landing page.

Ultimately, continuity must follow through into the sales funnel and the extended customer experience — once good brand expectations are set, you want to live up to them.

But for now, let’s focus on the experience up to and in the landing page.

When crafting a landing page for a particular search ad, it’s important to keep both the search query and the ad copy in mind as the source from which a respondent’s expectations have been set. The exact same ad might create very different expectations depending on the keyword it was associated with.

For example, take one of our ads for landing page software and services:

If this ad appears when someone searches for “landing page software”, it creates a different set of expectations than when someone searches for “landing page services”. Even if the exact same ad is effective for generating clicks from both of those queries, the respondent to the first clicks expecting to see content about software; the second expects to learn about services.

This is the essence of message match. (Our actual strategy for our own search marketing was detailed in a post by Justin last month.)

Landing pages themselves contain many different elements, and while it is the synthesis of all of them, taken as a whole, that impact a respondent’s net sense of continuity, for the sake of crafting or analyzing a page, we can look at the components individually:

• the written content (language, different ways of saying something)
• the image content (photos, illustrations, animations, video)
• the offer (specials, discounts, lead conversion incentives)
• the choices on the page (alternatives, navigation, escape hatches)
• the design, branding, and look-and-feel of the entire page

Traditionally, a lot of emphasis in landing page optimization is placed on testing different written content, image content, and offers — and the interplay between these elements.

Since paid search ads, at least today, are text-only, you might ask how images and design can have continuity in this context? What are the expectations? It’s subtle, but you want visual elements that reinforce and build upon the mental image established by the search query and ad copy. In our example above, “landing page software” might logically include screenshots of our software or a chart of the results or a marketer happily working on their laptop. Obviously, considerable creative license can (and should) be exercised — sometimes surprise is a great effect, as long as it ultimately pays off — but make no mistake: the visual dimension of a landing page is very much part of its continuity.

Consider continuity with choices as well. If someone clicked on an ad offering a white paper or a registration for a webinar, having few choices on the landing page makes sense — a relatively linear flow of steps to reach the white paper or webinar is logical. (Although it’s still up to you to making it compelling.) In contrast, someone responding to a more open-ended or early-in-the-funnel ad might expect more choices to help them interactively discover what’s most interesting about their intersection between their wants/needs and your company.

Design and branding are important for continuity too, but to appreciate that, we need to look beyond the core flow and consider other factors that impact a respondent’s sense of continuity.

Searcher Continuity Factors

The search query may be the first aspect of continuity that advertisers can directly identify with 100% confidence, but in the minds of users, the basis for continuity starts much earlier and is much broader:

• the search intent that motivated the user
• the previous experience has had with the company or the market
• the time and place from which the user is searching

True search intent is hard to know for certain, but it’s important to recognize that a particular search query is often an imperfect representation of that intent, and continuity is in the eye of the beholder. A user may try several different searches to find the results they’re looking for. Words and phrases can have overloaded meanings and different interpretations. Note that one way to deal with this challenge of ambiguity is to use post-click segmentation on your landing page.

Time and place — a function of geographic location — can also reveal expectations. People doing local searches (implicitly or explicitly) expect local advertisers — or a persuasive reason to consider a remote or virtual alternative. Often the circumstances of time and place (is it late at night? is it snowing?) contribute to intent. Location also inherits cultural norms, certainly applicable internationally, but even the difference between California, New York, and Texas can be significant enough to alter expectations.

However, perhaps the most significant factor outside the search query that contributes to a user’s expectations is previous experience with the company or the market. This is where design and branding are most connected to continuity in search marketing. If a user has a preconceived image of your firm — as a result of other marketing initiatives, your reputation, accepted standards in your industry, or a previous interaction with you — those are underlying expectations they bring to your ad and landing page.

For instance, a landing page for a pizzeria can have cheesy (ahem) stock photography and a somewhat clunky layout without really damaging its brand (albeit, not necessarily improving it either). However, if Apple Computer were to have such a landing page, it would be a disastrous discontinuity — because the expectation of design elegance is an established and integral part of their brand.

This isn’t just about brand standards per se — although those are certainly a part of it. Your landing page should maintain continuity with your overall brand.

Granted, there may be times when you wish to intentionally break continuity here — for the effect of surprise or to emphasize the difference of something from what preceded it — but do so carefully and be sure to pay it off.

Competitive Continuity Factors

Your search marketing doesn’t take place in a vacuum, an isolated funnel with just you and a prospect. When a user issues a search query and sees your ad, they’re also seeing it in the context of the organic results and competitor ads.

This content is largely outside of your control — although one certainly hopes to be ranking high in organic results with SEO efforts — but it nonetheless feeds into to a user’s mental picture of the search query. Everything on the search results page contributes to a user’s expectations for your ad and your landing page. Do your ad and landing page match with that picture?

Now, in this context, you may consciously decide to break continuity — at least to a certain degree. You want your ad and your landing page to stand out from the crowd. Differentiation is a powerful strategic device. However, it still must make sense. Balancing differentiation and continuity with the surrounding environment is one of the finer skills in executing exceptional search marketing.

Keep track of your competitors, where their ads are ranking, where their organic results are ranking. Click through to their landing pages to see what they present and how they present it. You don’t necessarily want to mimic them, or even acknowledge them, but if you understand that some of your respondents will visit your competitors’ landing pages before or after yours — and that will impact their expectations — you can leverage that knowledge to your advantage.

Sculpting expectations around competitors can be done on defense or offense. Is your ad at the top of the list of sponsored links, the middle, or the bottom? The higher your placement, the better your chance to set expectations that your competitors will lose points on; the lower your placement, the more opportunity you have to engage in judo marketing — leveraging expectations set by competitors against them.

For example, if your competitors are all emphasizing FREE SHIPPING and LOWEST PRICES, you have the option of emphasizing delivery time, reliability, customer service, etc., and painting them with the help of their own words as cheap and low quality. Even if you offer “complimentary shipping” as well, you have tremendous creative freedom in how you choose to incorporate that into your presentation.

Conclusion

Continuity is bigger simply having your ads match your landing pages. By understanding the entire space in which ads and landing pages are experienced in the minds of your respondents, you can take full advantage of implied continuity.