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 [...]

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. [...]

It’s free to sign up! AdWords charges you $5 for account activation. Don’t dump your entire AdWords account in. That’s just silly. Use the 80/20 rule. 20% of what you’re doing in Google can go over to adCenter. Just like a house fire, take only what you treasure most. Then accumulate later. There are settings [...]

Pay-Per-Click advertising is a beautiful thing. Set up an AdWords or adCenter account and your ads can target thousands of potential customers looking for a product just like yours. Mmm, that’s nice. But it can be complicated and difficult. Especially on a budget. And time consuming. PPC Essentials Package That’s why Portent is rolling out [...]

Part 6 is finally here! Yeah, I know. About time. Who’s read for some Budgeting and Billing? Microsoft adCenter Budgeting (2:08) This two minute video just goes over the different options: divide across the month or per day or the spend until depleted with definitions. Daily budget is a “target” and the actual spend will [...]

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 [...]

Are you tired of having to run a report in AdCenter every time you want some stats that aren’t: Yesterday, Last 7 Days, Today, This Month, Last Month, Last 3 Months, Last 6 Months, This Year, Last Year or Entire Time? Or in my case, I’m tired of deciphering just what would be 3 months [...]

Google AdWords is a mystical beast sometimes, capable of dumbfounding and goring the best of us. My cost-per-click cohort, Elizabeth, kindly tipped us off to Google’s most recent Quality Score update – and it appears the latest changes are starting to affect the paid search landscape in a big way. For some, scores have dropped [...]

Most optimization tips and instructional guides cover the big 3 of PPC search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN. But what about all those little guys out there? Have you tried any of those yet? I’ll review some 2nd and 3rd tier interfaces in the coming weeks, how the traffic was, how much it was, the [...]

Not everyone has the ability to work with Yahoo and receive the occasional free optimization help from their “experts.” If you do, carefully review the ads that come back. Several times, I sent in existing ad groups for help with ad optimization (who knows what will get a better quality index score than the search [...]