In charge of building your first PPC account? Don’t have a lot of time or money to spend within AdWords? Well you came to the right place. Over the course of the next six weeks, Portent PPC Strategists Chad Kearns and Tim Johnson will be laying down the knowledge in a six-part blog series detailing [...]

In charge of building your first PPC account? Don’t have a lot of time or money to spend within AdWords? Well you came to the right place. Over the course of the next six weeks, Portent PPC Strategists Chad Kearns and Tim Johnson will be laying down the knowledge in a six-part blog series detailing [...]

If you have ever re-organized an inherited AdWords account to get in line with best practices by moving keywords into new campaigns and creating new ad copy, you may have noticed how you don’t immediately get the results you were expecting. In fact, you may have concluded that all of the work just made your [...]

You might not be. I was poking around in Google Shopping results the other day and found that there are some merchants who have partnered with major brands that are essentially “piggy backing” off their name through the Google Shopping Feed. At first, I thought NewEgg was being just really clever/sneaky by changing their store [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Small business owners on a tight budget need to stretch their PPC advertising dollars to get the most bang for their buck. However, there are countless money-sucking traps along the way that can derail your online advertising goals. Here are five critical tips for PPC success for small businesses on a budget. 1. Separate Networks. [...]

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 [...]

If you found this article through Google Search, you may have already clicked on several other links making false promises to teach you how to block an IP address in Google Adwords. I did too; that’s why I wrote this. Those other articles are red herrings — part of an elaborate government ploy to distract [...]