Featured

I’ve prattled on about the marketing stack for a few years now, but haven’t really explained each chunk. This 5-post series explains the stack as a whole, then piece-by-piece. I’m not some TV series jerk who will keep you hanging, though, wondering which of your favorite characters will die next (cough HBO cough cough). Instead,… Read More

Internet Marketing

Dear Chief Marketing Officers: For nearly 20 years, we have worked together to build digital marketing as a discipline. You’ve trusted digital agencies like mine with your consumers, your brand, and your marketing dollars. You’ve taken the risks and the responsibility, while your digital agencies have responded with clicks, likes, and an avalanche of data… Read More

PPC

This post is brought to you by our special guest, Toni Voutilainen. Toni is a passionate PPC practitioner from a Finland-based Internet Agency Tulos Helsinki, operating in Scandinavia. Tulos and Portent are conducting a pilot of an International Geek Exchange program – this article is the culmination of Toni’s visit here to Seattle. This October, AdWords… Read More

Analytics

You heard me right. Last Click Attribution (LCA) is dead. This isn’t one of those hoaxes like with Andy Kaufman or SEO. LCA was a doomed model for a number of reasons. But for me, it no longer applies to the world we live in now. And it barely applied before. LCA will only stay… Read More

Internet Marketing

Dear Marketers of All Shapes and Sizes and Types, 2014 is a pivot year for digital. I’m not a headline-grabbing kind of guy. So when I say this, I mean it. This is the year that digital can go from a high-return, extremely effective 25% of client—by ‘client’ I mean agency clients or the companies… Read More

Internet Marketing

Marketers have always had a difficult time justifying their budgets. My grandfather was a Mad Man – working in advertising and marketing from the 60s to the 80s for a series of companies. (He eventually wound up a Sr. VP of Marketing at Doskocil Foods moving armies of pepperoni.) I remember being a wee lass… Read More

PPC

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads [RLSA] is an extremely useful feature that Google rolled out over the summer. It allows you to serve search ads to people who are on your remarketing lists, and for Portent’s small e-commerce clients, it’s definitely proven profitable.  So if you’re looking for another way to increase your sales, read… Read More

PPC

Portent is proud to announce the rebranding of PPC Essentials through the launch of ppc-essentials.com. Designed specifically with the small business advertiser in mind, PPC Essentials offers expert PPC management for monthly paid search budgets under $3,000 per month. The package offering allows businesses operating with a small budget to have an account setup and/or… Read More

SEO

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I wonder who writes up the documentation for Google. When they first announced the rel=author tag and Authorship configuration procedure on one of Google’s 11 blogs that I subscribe to, I jumped right on it and devoured the information and the process they described. Then I read it… Read More

PPC

Elizabeth initially presented the information below during her Mozinar on Sept. 10. But for those of you who aren’t interested in an hour-long audio presentation but want more info than a Slideshare, this is the post for you.  Consider this the “Tall,” not Venti version… Give us a break, it’s Seattle. Once upon a time I started… Read More

Just wrapped up today’s webinar. If you missed it (for shame) here’s the video: I actually only have about 1/3 of the meeting management window in the video this time. Nice improvement.

Analytics

I was the kid who sorted out Skittles by color. My favorite flavor was lime, which they’ve since changed to green apple — an atrocity if you ask me. That isn’t my point today, but I think it’s influenced how I work as a marketer. Google Analytics has done a lot of work around their… Read More

Social Media

Disclaimer: I’m not an analyst. I’m not a master marketing prognosticator. But sometimes it’s fun to look at a company and ask “If this went perfectly, what would it look like?” That’s what I’m doing here. Don’t buy stock based on my ramblings. Please. Yep, Twitter’s gone public. They’re now TWTR. (Which I find funny,… Read More

SEO

SEO is about attracting non-paid search traffic to your website. The idea is that a person searches the Web using Bing or Google, etc. and your site comes up in the non-paid search results. To that end, it’s important to make sure your website is easily understood by both people and machines. People = your… Read More

Internet Marketing

Building relationships and strengthening interpersonal dynamics is essential to Internet marketing – but it’s also at the core of every industry, job, and facet of our personal lives. This makes building relationships important, and sometimes our lives depend on it… (Insert scary movie score here.) While horror movie aficionados recognize that there are certain rules… Read More

Random

We did a survey of every Affordable Care Act health benefits exchange, including Healthcare.gov. I expected to find deep, complicated server latency issues or similar. Instead, we found some of the most ridiculous, simple-to-fix, small issues that are affecting site speed that I nearly popped a vessel. You can read our report, and see the… Read More