Yearly Archives: 2014

PPC

Both pay-per-click advertising and organic listings vie for your attention when you search, but do the two types of search results always have to be at odds, or can savvy marketers use SEO(Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) in tandem to dominate the search results? Making Portent history, Laura Oden (PPC Strategist) and Kaitlin McMichael… Read More

Random

We got challenged! Some colleagues challenged Portent in the Ice Bucket challenge. Here’s the video: We changed it up. Here’s why: ALSA has now raised $111 million. That is freaking fantastic. It’s a great cause. 5,000-6,000 people are diagnosed with ALS each year, impacting tens of thousands of people. 30,000 or more Americans live with… Read More

Analytics

Google brought Universal Analytics (UA) out of beta earlier this year in April. It’s ushered in an exciting new era where integration with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems is possible. That kind of integration is the holy grail of web analytics — truly closed-loop reporting, from the time a visitor first hits your website, to when they become… Read More

PPC

Problem Ever since Google AdWords introduced enhanced campaigns, targeting mobile traffic effectively using mobile bid modifiers has been an important strategy for all PPC managers.  Some of you may have mobile bid modifiers set in your campaigns already, but aren’t seeing very good results from mobile traffic.  Others may have your mobile bid modifiers set… Read More

One spring day of 2011, Google announced a new thing called “Authorship.” They described it as a way of using data to “help people find content from great authors in our search results.” With little exception, the SEO community rejoiced. Finally, we, the content creators and bloggers of the world, were on top. By adding… Read More

Account Management

A brand is a pulse of a company and customers interact with it every day across print, media, online and social platforms. The ever growing mobile industry is changing the way customers interact with and purchase their favorite brand’s products. In this post I will provide three important suggestions to build your online brand. Let’s… Read More

SEO

If you grew up watching Sesame Street like me, you might have heard this song: One of these things is not like the others,One of these things just doesn’t belong,Can you tell which thing is not like the othersBy the time I finish my song? The search results that you see within your browser are… Read More

Social Media

Sometimes when you’re a social media strategist (or, really, just a human with a smart phone or tablet), you get stuck in a routine that involves the same few social media mobile applications. Whether I’m on the bus or about to go to sleep, I find myself checking my three favorite apps: Facebook (I know,… Read More

Design & Development

In college, when we asked our teachers how to assign a price to our art, they would tell us to charge whatever it was worth to us. This answer was thoroughly infuriating because we wanted a ‘correct’ number. What’s the equation? Is each square inch of canvas (or wood, or paper) worth a certain amount?… Read More

PPC

Google AdWords’ recent announcement on the retirement of exact match in favor of the “close variant” default setting not only came as a bit of surprise to me, but definitely garnered the expected outrage from the PPC community, including petitions, Tweets and blog posts like this one. (Strangely enough, we seem to have avoided the… Read More

Copywriting

Last week I talked about the 20 biggest copywriting disasters I’ve suffered, and how to avoid them. Well, I never actually experienced some of the disasters I talked about — they were so over the top I don’t see how they even happened — but most of them come from painful, personal experience. Here are… Read More

Copywriting

I have a confession: I love TV. When I was a dirty-kneed seven-year-old sitting on our brown carpet, I watched the A-Team and MacGyver and Quantum Leap. I loved the consistency of these shows, how I already had an idea what the premise was going into it, and I loved to be surprised by the… Read More

Project Management

Here at Portent, we work together to do our best to wow the crowd with our many talented individuals and skills. Have you ever listened to a song that’s just one long guitar solo? I have, and while it’s an impressive show of expertise and skill, more often than not there’s a lot left to… Read More

PPC

What is the Google Display Network you might ask? The Google Display Network (GDN) is a collection of websites that partner with Google to display ads on their web pages.  Advertisers can use this channel to find relevant webpages for their message to appear on and increase their marketing reach. Building campaigns on the GDN… Read More

SEO

The first thing to do when you’re starting out your quest to be the master of international search is to go incognito. You can’t just search on Google.com for your product/service and expect to see the same thing that everyone else in the world will. Google personalizes search results according to your location, your search… Read More