Articles by Chad Kearns
Chad Kearns // 7 Jun, 2017
Why Every Marketer Should Spend a Month Time Tracking
If you’re not tracking your own hours as well as those of your team, I’m here to convince you to start today. Time tracking task by task isn’t fun. It can seem trivial for some and scary for others. But with effective time tracking and analysis, the payoffs in identifying bottlenecks in current work processes… Read More
Chad Kearns // 21 Feb, 2017
Work Smarter, Not Harder in Digital Marketing
Walk through any professional services office around the country and I bet you’ll hear a similar theme when asking executives, managers, and practitioners about their workload- ‘there’s never enough time in the day.’ It happens all the time at Portent. I hear it from our team and I hear it from our clients. For marketing… Read More
Chad Kearns // 30 Sep, 2016
13 Places to Look on Your Next Google AdWords Account Audit
Auditing your Google AdWords account on a quarterly or semi-annual basis is a great way to step back from the day-in, day-out management grind to find gaps in performance or areas for expansion to help boost overall performance. While some marketing managers and business owners know the importance of stepping back to review an AdWords… Read More
Chad Kearns // 26 Aug, 2016
Short Term Growth: Jump Start Your Digital Marketing Today
From businesses ready to go to market with a new product or service, to companies with a longstanding history but little digital presence, business owners, investors, CEOs, and marketing managers are always looking for quick wins when it comes to getting started with their digital marketing initiatives. Quick-result potential initiatives provide marketers the ability to… Read More
Chad Kearns // 15 Jul, 2016
Why Can’t I See My PPC Ads?
One of the most common questions our clients ask us when starting a new PPC campaign is “Where are my ads? I searched for my keywords and didn’t see my ad.” This is a reasonable question. They are paying for clicks. So how come they can’t trigger ads themselves? It’s important to understand the internal… Read More
Chad Kearns // 13 May, 2016
Building Successful PPC: Tracking Success
Now that we have built the account structure, populated the ad groups with keywords, written compelling ad copy, and added in ad extensions, it’s time to go live!… Hold Your Horses. Are you set up to track performance? Having the ability to track the success of paid search campaigns is vital to the success of… Read More
Chad Kearns // 9 May, 2016
Building Successful PPC: Understanding Campaign Settings
This post is the second in a six-part series written by Portent’s small business team outlining the fundamentals in building your first PPC account through Google AdWords. Follow along in our six-part series as we will be laying down the knowledge detailing best practices for setting yourself up for PPC success. Once your account structure… Read More
Chad Kearns // 8 May, 2016
Building Successful PPC: Structuring your Google AdWords Account
This post is the first in a six-part series written by Portent’s small business team outlining the fundamentals of building your first PPC account through Google AdWords. Follow along in our six-part series as we will be laying down the knowledge detailing best practices for setting yourself up for PPC success. Structuring your Google AdWords… Read More
Chad Kearns // 4 May, 2016
5 Critical Tips for PPC Success for Small Businesses on a Budget
Small business owners are typically on a tight budget with every dollar accounted for. It is imperative that advertisers stretch their PPC budget to get the highest return on their investment. Let’s review our five top PPC tips for campaign success on a limited budget: 1. Separate networks by campaign When advertisers set up their… Read More
Chad Kearns // 26 Apr, 2016
How to Setup a Google AdWords Remarketing Campaign
Remarketing campaigns through Google AdWords offer advertisers an additional tactic to drive potentially high value visitors back to their website in an effort to grow overall conversion figures. Remarketing campaigns allow businesses to stay connected with their target audience after they leave their website by showing ads to them on other websites across the web.… Read More
Chad Kearns // 22 Apr, 2016
The Google Analytics E-commerce Dashboard Every AdWords Marketer Needs Now
Wouldn’t it be great if you could get all of your Google AdWords e-commerce data in one easy-to-read dashboard? Using custom dashboards in Google Analytics, you can! Creating these custom dashboards from the ground up can be a time-consuming and frustrating process if you don’t know what you’re doing. Lucky for you, we have a… Read More
Chad Kearns // 15 Apr, 2016
6 Keys to Great PPC Ad Copy
Through pay-per-click marketing, businesses have the opportunity to create highly targeted advertising campaigns in an effort to reach their most valuable customers online. For many businesses that cannot compete in the organic rankings for their most important keywords, paid advertising provides an outlet to get in front of the right customers at the very top… Read More
Chad Kearns // 10 Mar, 2016
7 Easy Ways to Stop Wasting Money in Google AdWords
Unfortunately, many digital marketers have experienced it first hand or know of someone who has. One way or another, we all know a story of advertisers losing money through pay-per-click marketing campaigns via Google AdWords. Losing money on Google AdWords is much easier than you might think. With all of the intricate campaign-level settings, setup… Read More
Chad Kearns // 10 Dec, 2015
How to set a PPC budget
“What should my PPC budget be?” How to set a PPC budget is one of those questions I get asked on an extremely regular basis as we start working with new businesses. So much so that I thought it’d be a good time to put the “quick” answer out for general consumption. Depending on how advanced… Read More
Chad Kearns // 9 Oct, 2014
Six Ways to Win on your Competitor’s Branded Keywords
Occupying your competitor’s SERP space with a pay-per-click ad provides the ability to capture traffic and convert visitors into customers who may have had previous intentions of spending their money elsewhere. While bidding on the branded terms of your competitors is not an innovative practice, poor execution is something we see over and over again.… Read More