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 [...]
Articles by Michael W.
Michael has spent the better part of the last decade nerding out on various marketing disciplines: direct mail, design, search, social and – more recently – analytics.
The New Yahoo Rich Ads in Search (RAIS) Beta
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 [...]
Opportunity Analysis using Multi-Channel Funnels
Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) can provide a lot of valuable data about the entire multi-touch conversion process. But the most common question I’ve heard from people in this industry is – okay, but what do I do with this? Today I’m going to step through using MCF for opportunity analysis both in Paid Search and Organic [...]
Ad Comparison Tool
A few weeks back, I wrote a guest post on PPC Hero about the Profit per Impression (PPI) metric. In the post, I talk about calculating PPI manually using an Excel Spreadsheet. To that end, I created a free spreadsheet to do just that: the Ad Comparison Tool! How does the Ad Comparison Tool work? [...]
QR Codes: A Social Experiment at SMX
A few weeks ago at SMX, I wanted to try something. I was too busy to order business cards in the weeks leading up to the conference. And in lieu of taking generic company cards to the show, I figured I’d make a QR code for folks to scan. QR Code Destination At a conference [...]
Studying for the Google Analytics IQ Exam
I cannot lie – The prospect of taking the Google Analytics Certification Test intimidated me. I know my way around Google Analytics well. I counsel clients. But Google has this way of concocting test questions that are just odd enough to make you question your answers. Would there be lots of questions on the code [...]
Advanced Segment Tutorial #1 – Keyword Groups
I’m Michael Wiegand, resident Analytics nerd at Portent. Let’s be honest: With a slew of new Google Analytics features being launched every 6-12 months, it can make your head spin just keeping up, let alone finding a practical application for them. In this monthly series, I’ll tackle making sense of one of the more powerful [...]
Shout-Out: Hanapin Marketing’s $16,000 SEM Sweepstakes
Our good friends over at Hanapin Marketing – you know, the folks who run the PPC Hero blog – are running a pretty amazing SEM Sweepstakes right now. They have some great prizes available, including: (3) Paid Subscriptions to SEOMoz (1) 3-Month Subscription to ClickEquations (a neat bid management tool that we use at Portent) [...]
New Predictive PPC Tool: Paid Search Return Estimations
The Paid Search Problem Let’s be honest. All too often, starting or optimizing a paid search campaign is a guessing game. You make obvious changes to your keyword list, rewrite some ads, and setup a new landing page – but for the most part, it’s like a Jackson Pollock painting. You throw a bunch of [...]
3 New Google Analytics Custom Reports a PPC Marketer Should Be Using
If there’s one amazing thing about Google Analytics, it’s that Google’s ability to improve it is never dormant. At their Mountain View compound, they’re always looking for a way to constantly better their products. Here at Portent, we have a similar resolve – except that ours is to exploit Google’s tools to achieve our internet [...]
