There are a myriad of reasons why businesses choose to outsource their marketing efforts to agencies instead of having an in-house team lead and execute. The truth is that both can work equally well, depending on the people involved.  However, even the best practitioners can fumble a transition.  If your business wants to bring its marketing team in-house, discover our recommended best practices and some “definitely don’t do these” practices for the transition.  Defining In-House Marketing Having an in-house marketing team means the business has hired its own internal staff to h ..read more

In the second quarter of 2023, there were 912 million adblock users worldwide. YouTube hasn’t given up its fight against ad blockers. What started as a beta test in June 2023 has transitioned into globally implementing slow website load times and blocking users in 2024. Google confirmed that if they detect you are using an ad blocker, you will have very slow video load times and will be urged to try YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience. Many Reddit users online have reported receiving the following notification indicating that an ad blocker has been detected while using YouTube Others ha ..read more

Within content marketing, we’ve often used several engagement metrics to understand content engagement: time on page, scroll depth, link or button clicks, and so on. With GA4, there’s a new metric called engagement rate, giving us one holistic metric to summarize user engagement on a page or site. What Is Engagement Rate in GA4 & Why Is It Important? Engagement rate in GA4 is the percentage of engaged sessions on your website or mobile app. Google defines an engaged session as “a session that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews or screenviews ..read more

As a marketing consultant, one of my absolute favorite things is sharing valuable industry insight with a client contact. This could be part of an audit presentation, competitive analysis, workshop, training, or strategic business review. It brings me joy to help clients connect the dots with opportunities that will create growth and innovation for their brand. At Portent, we’re marketing nerds to the core. We help our clients cut through the “best practices” noise to implement solutions in 2024 that will move the needle toward achieving their goals within their industry. We also take pride in ..read more

Love it or hate it, Artificial intelligence is here. It’s forever changing the way that we do digital marketing. Content Strategists have felt this most acutely, as consumer-facing AI has primarily been comprised of Large Language Models (or LLMs) to date. We’ve started using AI in our Content Marketing and even had an AI writer (Page) start producing blog posts for us. But Open AI’s ChatGPT recently introduced an Advanced Data Analysis feature. Of course, that has all Digital Marketing Analysts scrambling overnight to protect our jobs. The fear is understandable, but we need to be realistic ..read more

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is a complex digital marketing channel. It presents a significant opportunity for digital marketers to grow their traffic and conversion metrics. But without a smart strategy and careful tactics, pay-per-click can cause major headaches. We’ve put together the answers to some of the most common questions we get asked to better explain PPC marketing. If you’re looking to skip ahead, here’s what we’ll cover on this page: PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Marketing Meaning Types of PPC Ads How PPC Works Major PPC Advertising Platforms Benefits of PPC Advertising Pitfalls of PPC Ad ..read more

The topic of branded bidding leads many marketers to the question: “If I bid on my own branded terms, should I also bid on my competitor’s branded terms?” There are many benefits to bidding on competitor brand terms, including lower cost per click, less competition, and capturing your competitor’s customers!  In this post, we will argue why bidding on competitors’ brand terms is part of a successful middle-funnel PPC campaign and should be considered within all verticals. What is Brand Bidding? Branded bidding is a PPC strategy when you bid on your brand terms or brand names of othe ..read more

Suppose the primary goal of your paid search engine marketing (SEM) account is to acquire leads. In that case, you’re likely counting lead submissions as your primary conversion to optimize your campaigns and measure success.  Optimizing for lead submissions has been considered the standard and best practice for a long time. Indeed, it’s still a decent method to ensure your paid search and display campaigns produce the desired results toward your business goals and bottom line. However, automated bidding algorithms in platforms like Google Ads have advanced by leaps and bounds within the ..read more

Starting your first LinkedIn advertising campaign can be tricky. The platform’s ad management functionality differs from other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, but it also has several excellent tools to target your ideal audience.  LinkedIn’s value for advertisers is its powerful interest-targeting capabilities. For example, you can target LinkedIn members based on the information stated on their profile, such as their job title, job seniority, skill-sets level, current company, industry, and more.  Think you’re ready to build your first B2B LinkedIn campaign? Here are the steps ..read more

Every year, we put a post like this together. Without fail, and with the aid of hindsight, some of the trends we call out are utterly silly. But some seem prescient. That’ll also happen this year. If you want to look at our past predictions, here’s what we put together for 2023. As we gaze into the future of digital analytics in 2024, the dynamic interplay of technology, consumer behavior, and industry standards shapes this evolving landscape. Some of these concepts will be familiar to you from past trends we’ve surfaced, but let’s dive into what we believe will be significantly influential ..read more