The Portent Blog

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OH MY GOD FACEBOOK IS DEAD STOP BUYING ADS WE’RE ALL DOOMED Hold on a second. The Facebook privacy quake has already forced the Facebook to change the way they handle and collect consumer data. That’s changing their advertising platform. And there’s more to come. But before you freak out and pull your clients’ dollars,… Read More

Internet Marketing

My slides from today’s Engage presentation: From Mailers to CX: 25 Years of Marketing, And Where to Go Next from Ian Lurie Links coming soon.

Internet Marketing

There’s a scourge in marketing: Nerdsplaining. It sucks the wind out of meetings, causes eyes to roll violently back, and may cause some clients to choke on their turkey sandwich. If I’ve ever inflicted these on you, leave a comment: PPC: Ask me why your Adwords campaign is sucking wind, and you’ll get a ten-minute… Read More

Content Strategy

Editorial calendars suck. There. I said it. They suck because they are wish lists, not sensible plans. They’re inflexible. They use terminology your team and clients don’t understand, like “10x” and “long form.” They suck because we try to jam our marketing teams into calendars. That’s backward. We should build calendars based on our teams.… Read More

SEO

On the surface, both the hreflang tag and canonical tag do similar things – tell search engines which version of a page they are supposed to index and deliver to particular searchers. However, these tags do not have the same function. They are not the same thing. As digital marketers, we keep abreast of the… Read More

Design & Development

Only a fraction of digital marketers consider design a core component of our jobs. Traditionally, we leave designing to designers. This lets the rest of us spend more time serving our king and queen: data and text. Besides, we’re just a [insert job title here] – most agencies have a design team to do pesky… Read More

Analytics

Here’s the latest excerpt in the upcoming analytics e-book on cross-channel opportunity gap analysis. Another reminder: We’re using Google Analytics and a few other third-party data providers here to unearth long-term SEO opportunities and PPC opportunities, but the tool you use isn’t as important as the process of discovering what channels and tactics work for… Read More

Project Management

When you’re structuring how you deliver services to clients, whether they’re internal or external, it’s important to think through how that foundational planning work will impact the actual marketing project management process. When you’re white-boarding business structure and working from phrases like “exceeding the client promise” (something we try to live by at Portent) it’s… Read More

PPC

It’s like lions, and tigers, and bears, but with tyranny and oppression. But I’m not here to discuss international politics today. The reason for my witty extremely unclever title is because of location targeting. Or, more specifically, the lack of certain negative targets which I never knew I needed until a few months ago. But,… Read More

SEO

Just in case you hadn’t heard yet, On December 1, 2017, Google (read: Danny Sullivan) officially confirmed that the maximum length of a snippet in their search results has increased to about 320 characters. How long should my Meta Description be? Google is now saying that the maximum length for a snippet in search results… Read More

Internet Marketing

There are few things more butt-clenchingly aggravating than watching a great set of marketing recommendations decay in a stakeholder’s rubbish heap. It happens to me. A lot. So I ponder the problem. A lot. I figured it out: We’re asked to lead, but we’re not in charge. Stakeholders—internal or external— hire us to provide direction… Read More

SEO

We’ve all seen pagination links — those little numbered links at the top and bottom of multi-page content. They are used on blogs, e-commerce sites, webcomics, gallery pages, SERPs, and multi-page articles.   From the human visitor’s point of view, pagination is pretty simple. If you are on page one, and you want to see… Read More

SEO

There’s a chill in the air, some of you even have snow and ice. For most people, it’s been a busy time of year. For those in eCommerce, it hasn’t just been busy, it’s “someone come dig me out of this avalanche” busy! That was the case when I was working in eCommerce before coming… Read More

Internet Marketing

How to Keep More of the Holiday Pie in Paid Search The holiday shopping season brings many rewards for eCommerce businesses, but over the past several years that brings a familiar seasonal challenge: Amazon. It’s no secret that Amazon ramps up its SEM competitive presence during the holiday shopping season – beginning heavily in November,… Read More

Internet Marketing

My list of digital marketing tactics. I wrote it in March 2008 and last updated it December 2017. This is a really old post. I wrote it jammed into a narrow seat on a plane in 2008. I’m trying to keep it somewhat up to date, but I can only do so much, so it’s… Read More

Internet Marketing

Preface: This blog post is one in a series of articles that Portentites produced in a pair-writing experiment. It’s a little more broad than usual because it represents two subject matter experts from different practice areas, coming together to combine their knowledge for a broader look at the internet marketing topics that face real businesses.… Read More