Marketers are modern hit makers

SAN DIMAS - WebMetro's offices here are the place where many of the sponsored ads that show up in search engine results are born.

"Our focus is on online marketing, or what we call, `online direct marketing," said Lydia Chen Shah, the company's director of marketing communications.
WebMetro's beginnings go back to 1995, when the company was founded in Pasadena as a training center of sorts for business owners interested in marketing their goods and services online, Shah said.
The Internet has evolved dramatically since the dial-up era, and WebMetro has changed as well. The company moved its offices to San Dimas in 2002 and now has some 60 employees and growing.
"Now we're ready to knock down a wall," Shah said, referring to the company's need to expand its office space.
In layman's terms, the "online direct marketing" at the center of WebMetro's current mission can include the sponsored "pay per click" ads that appear on the right-hand side of a computer monitor when the user - or potential customer - gets results from a search engine.
WebMetro also seeks to get clients' attention in the "organic" results, which search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo derive from their own algorithms.
Thus, the company's search engine optimization specialists spend their days trying to figure out how to get their clients' websites to the top of search results.

"We're really held accountable for being able to measure our results," Shah said.

WebMetro's analysts can try to learn how to capture Internet users' attention by using cookies to track which search terms lead customers to clients' websites, and whether that click led to a sale, or "conversion," in marketing lingo.
"We can look at the exact query that someone looks on," said John McCarthy, the senior director of digital strategy.
"We don't capture any personal information. We capture the device," he also said. "I don't know anything about them."
Search engine marketing is WebMetro's core competency, Shah said, but WebMetro's offerings also include online display advertisements.
WebMetro's style is to be almost invisible. There is no signature look or feel to the company's ads, said Shah.
The company is also "sector agnostic." Clients disclosed on WebMetro's website are as diverse as Public Storage, Pratt & Whitney Canada and Frederick's of Hollywood, and there's no one way to find customers online.
"We have to help our clients decide where is the best place to invest. You have a million different formats, or what feels like a million different formats," Shah said.
Source http://www.sbsun.com/