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 [...]

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 [...]

I hate doing things twice. I also hate doing things by hand. When it comes to PPC reporting, there is nothing quite as cumbersome as recreating reports from scratch month after month. Thankfully we have the tools available to us to make easy and effective automated reports a cinch. Assuming you have Excel, you’re pretty [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Rick is the CEO and Co-Founder of CPC Strategy, a comparison shopping engine management company started in 2007. They take client feeds across multiple platforms (Amazon, Nextag, PriceGrabber, etc;) and optimize them for ROI through strategy, attention to detail and expertise in CSEs (comparison shopping engines.) Rick was kind enough to let me ask a [...]

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. [...]

How do you know when you should use a lander over a category or product page in PPC? Well, yes, you test. But let’s say you’ve tested between the two, but are stuck in a circle and would really like to test a category lander just for PPC and need some “evidence” to convince a [...]