Portent Blog
portent.com · Company blog · on HN since 2012
Portent is a digital marketing agency whose blog covers SEO, site speed, content marketing, infographics, and paid social ads.
What HN saysHN commenters cite it on unreliable Webmaster Tools data, and one finds the Portent homepage slow despite its posts on site speed.
18HN people shared it
3linked it in comments
23stories submitted
274story points
3 years agolast shared
2012people per year2026
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What HN people wrote when they linked it
trevin · 2013-09-24
The data in Webmaster Tools has been historically unreliable[1][2]. If you compare it to data in Google Analytics, the two have often been world's apart. Sadly, this isn't going to come close to replacing accurate keyword data in GA.
[1]http://www.portent.com/blog/analytics/google-webmaster-tools-query-dat…
[2]http://moz.com/blog/comparing-ranktracking-methods-browser-vs-crawler-…
irahul · 2012-05-24
I don't know. The landing page http://www.portent.com/ is painfully slow for me. The optimization listed are mostly frontend optimization. The first thing I would do is to figure out the bottleneck.
curl -w "\nTotal time: %{time_total}\nTime pretransfer: %{time_pretransfer}\nTime starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer}\nSize download: %{size_download}\nSpeed download: % {speed_download}\n" http://www.portent.com/
Total time: 2.629
Time pretransfer: 0.375
Time starttransfer: 1.400
Size download: 32730
Speed download: 12449.000
Ok. Not bad. Backend seems to be fine. But then I did the profiling in chrome. Some cdn requests are well past 25 seconds in the timeline. For a user, the site load takes more than 25 seconds. Your cdn is the bottleneck - you should work on fixing the cdn first.
awavering · 2023-09-19
Articles like this always seem to miss the ways that the big analytics platforms are used in real life by marketing and product teams. If all you are doing is measuring page hits, then Google Analytics is overkill and you should be using one of the privacy focused alternatives. However, if you care about connecting your marketing tactics to larger strategic goals and measuring the impact of your work, a properly configured analytics stack is still really important.
I really like https://www.portent.com/onetrick/ for anyone looking for an intro to how analytics enhances marketing work.