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 [...]

Here at Portent, we’re always looking for new advertising platforms to test out. We’ve had our eye on AdMedia’s Bid4Keywords paid search advertising for a while. AdMedia has been offering Bid4Keywords service since 2007, but we had never given it a try, until now. We set up a test to get to know the service [...]

Armed once again with intern Tim and a few dollars from Portent’s pocketbook, I decided to take Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) for a spin using our small business PPC Essentials management package as a test case. I made up my mind pretty quickly and an informal poll of my massive follower list (massive being a [...]

I’ve never done a prediction piece for the Portent blog before but based on the number of times a year I get asked “how much will I make from PPC?” I must have a crystal ball somewhere. (Particularly since when this question is usually asked, it’s been 5 minutes, I haven’t seen the cart funnel, [...]

In our endless quest to find the “next big thing” in PPC, we tried a small test at Portent on Portent products and services with Twitter ads. I noticed there were many “how to get started” posts but few data-supported case studies with results. Armed with PPC intern Tim, a $100 head start from 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 [...]

Well OK, I’m being a tiny bit dramatic. But Google Shopping could totally and utterly screw you over if: You’re not a major brand with an AdWords rep to spoon feed you You’re not familiar with how shopping feeds, shopping engines & AdWords works You haven’t started thinking about this and you’re an ecommerce retailer [...]

IT’S FREE MONEY! Now that we have your attention, Portent is proud to announce a newly created referral program for our PPC Essentials management package. What does this mean? It means that if you refer Portent’s PPC Essentials package to a small business owner or marketing manager and they sign up for our monthly management [...]

Sean Bean dies in just about every movie and television show he’s in, but that doesn’t mean he’s dumb. And when it comes to paid search, Bean’s Boromir is absolutely right: becoming an expert at PPC takes time, experience, and some good intuition. But before one can master PPC, one must learn the basics. This [...]