Articles by Michael Wiegand

A study of 27 small business accounts Professionals who’ve spent any time in paid search – at an agency or in-house – can tell you how much of a big deal Quality Score (QS) is to us in the industry. We base our strategies on it. We lie awake at night wondering how to improve [...]

With all the talk about enhanced campaigns results in the last week—on PPC Hero, most notably—we were curious to see how they would fly with a well-known brand, both from a smartphone and tablet perspective. A quick enhanced campaigns case study The methodology: Chose 1 brand campaign, 1 non-brand campaign Established baseline of performance for [...]

Portent PPC Google+ Hangouts This will serve as the pilot for Portent’s ongoing hangout series where we talk about paid search current events and give you our analysis and commentary. Today’s hangout topic: AdWords Enhanced Campaigns A new feature announced just recently by Google. It’s caused quite a hullabaloo in the industry, to say the [...]

My daughter just turned 3. And aside from wondering where the devil the last few years of my life went, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make Christmas special for a girl whose birthday is in December. Charlie loves technology. My iPad 2 was instantly hers the moment I brought it home a [...]

If you’ve followed my blog musings in the last year or so at Portent, you’ll know that I’m a bit of a dashboard nut. My Perfect Google Analytics Dashboard post took off in ways I never imagined. (Thanks guys!) But here’s the thing: I was lying to you all – or misleading you, anyway. There [...]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks, you’ve probably seen that Google Analytics (GA) announced a new beta called Shortcuts: The idea is you can save new report views you’ve just discovered or old report views that you revisit often. How Do I Make a Shortcut? Couldn’t be simpler, really. [...]

Google AdWords (AW) Remarketing has been a brilliant tool from the outset, but let’s not kid ourselves – it’s a bit of a chore to set up. You have to generate yet another tracking code, tag various pages on your site with it and wait for those pixels to gather precious user cookies. Google – [...]

Google provides a list of expansion ideas on a periodic basis right in your account under the Opportunities tab: Keyword suggestions, bid suggestions, potential volume – they provide the works: This seems like a slam dunk. It’s not. Google wants you to spend more money in AdWords. End of story. Their suggestions are only based [...]

Building dashboards is a big to-do for any marketing professional. The temptation is to cram it full of juicy data and a novel worth of narrative explaining said data. Well, you shouldn’t. Trust me. There is such a thing as the perfect dashboard. And I’ve already built it for you. The Anatomy of the Perfect [...]

With Google seemingly rolling out ad extensions every month, the Bing/Yahoo Search Alliance has lagged frightfully behind in terms of ad innovation. Until now. Rich Ads in Search (RAIS) is a hybrid answer to Google’s Ad Sitelinks Extensions and Product Listing Ads. We’ll walk through getting RAIS setup, and the results you stand to gain [...]