Get hands-on help from a whip-smart team of expert marketers.
Since we started in 2011, our clients’ ROI has always been our north star. That’s why we only hire senior-level, specialized talent with a minimum of 10 years experience each. Our team’s deep expertise, real world experience, and strategic thinking consistently deliver exceptional results.
Ben Wills
Founder & CEO
Ben founded Decoder in 2011 with the mission of delivering real ROI for clients through a fully data-driven, transparent, and accountable approach to digital marketing.
With deep experience in digital marketing strategy, SEO, PPC, CRO, analytics, and content marketing, Ben excels at translating complex business needs into clear, prioritized marketing roadmaps. From there, he collaborates closely with clients and team members to execute both on the big picture strategy as well as the day-to-day, detailed decision-making it takes to pull it off.
Beyond overseeing client strategy, his focus is on attracting and retaining expert talent, refining processes, and choosing engagements with a clear line of sight to more leads, sales, and revenue. Ben’s philosophy is to let the results speak for themselves and be the driver of both clients’ success and Decoder’s by extension.
Outside of work, he moonlights as a musician, outdoorsy person, and stereotypical Pacific Northwesterner.
Gail Menasco
SEO Strategist
Gail Menasco has been working in the SEO industry for over a decade working with clients spanning from Fortune 100 to local clients. She specializes in content strategy and understanding the intent of the searcher and also dovetails with a technical team with the goal of increasing organic visibility and conversions.
Gail feverishly keeps up on Google updates, search trends and works hard to see results that will impact the client’s business objectives. She’s highly skilled at using data visualization tools like Tableau to find the story within the data. This enables her to create effective and impactful content calendars, social media strategies, on-page optimization, and content creation that drive results for her clients.
In her off-time, you can find her jumping out of planes, paragliding, scuba diving, and living life to the fullest.
Simone Paddock
SEO Strategist
Simone is a nerd at heart and just wants websites to be faster, easier to navigate, and serve up more engaging content. To make this vision reality, she has spent the last 10 years shepherding Fortune 500s to achieving technical SEO brilliance – no matter if the site runs on a simple CMS or a multi-million-URL maze of custom-built modules.
Simone is a nimble, data-driven professional, fusing extensive enterprise and technical SEO, business and marketing experiences into one skill set with a proven ability to help Fortune 100 companies reach their strategic SEO and content goals.
Madelyn Capehart
SEO Strategist
Madelyn brings a decade of experience in digital marketing, SEO, and content strategy, with extensive experience developing tailored and comprehensive SEO strategies tailored to each client’s unique needs. She prides herself on taking strategic, data-driven approach that delivers measurable results at scale.
Madelyn thrives on coming up with inventive solutions to complex challenges, always aiming to push the boundaries of conventional approaches to find a competitive advantage.
In her time off, you can find Madelyn at the park with her pug, Franklin, enjoying sunny beach days in Southern California or gaming on her Nintendo Switch.
Joe Martinez
Paid Search & Social Manager
Joe is a paid media expert, writer, and speaker with over a decade of experience. He started working in the PPC industry at the beginning of 2012 and has since been named a Top 25 Most Influential PPC Expert by PPC Hero from 2017 to 2020.
Joe has written for Social Media Examiner, Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, WordStream, PPC Hero, SEMrush, and more. He has hosted webinars for SEMrush, Unbounce, Quora and Microsoft Ads. He regularly speaks at conferences and organizations such as SMX (Advanced, Munich, East, West), HeroConf, Inbound, Pubcon (Pro, Florida, Austin), SMXL, MnSearch Summit, SEMpdx, and more.
When he’s not diving deep into data and optimizing accounts, there’s a high probability he’s obsessing about the latest Star Wars show and building his vinyl record collection.
Michelle Morgan
Paid Search & Social Manager
Michelle Morgan is an international speaker and has been in the paid media industry for over a decade. She’s been in PPC since 2010 and has honed her PPC skills in both in-house and agency roles.
She won “SEM Speaker of the Year” at the Search Engine Land Awards in 2018 and was voted the #1 Most Influential PPC Pro from PPC Hero in 2020. She’s a regular contributor to Search Engine Journal, Clix Marketing, Wordstream and others.
Michelle is also a former collegiate golfer, LEGO nerd, and will drop pretty much anything to go hang out with dogs.
Gabriel Gandzjuk
UX Designer
Gabe has 15 years of experience in both interactive and print design working with diverse brands such as Gap Inc, Gulfstream, OHSU, Walmart, The Home Depot, Pebble Beach Co, Snowbird, and Wacom.
What inspires him most is a constant desire to grow and learn through creative expression in an attempt to translate and interact with the world around us. He’s always looking for new challenges and new ways to communicate visually.
James Alborough
Web Developer
Ryan Summers
CRO Strategist
For 18 years, Ryan has been a front-runner in enterprise analytics and optimization. He spearheads data insights, research, and optimization for diverse organizations—including B2B, D2C, Energy, Education, Healthcare, Non-Profits.
Ryan advocates for testing as a tool for exploring bigger business challenges and validating customer understanding in addition to the performance benefits. His expertise not only consistently boosts business performance, but also enhances customer understanding, and optimizes the digital experience.
He’s equally passionate about building community for families with children who have Type 1 Diabetes and recently founded a non-profit to serve that mission, Type 1 Unbound.
Amber Cummings
CRO Strategist (On Sabbatical)
For over 15 years, Amber has been designing and optimizing websites for boutique ad agencies and tech start-ups. In 2018, Amber joined Decoder to further develop her conversion rate optimization skills and apply them to diverse businesses and industries.
She’s fascinated by human behavior and how to optimize sites to better serve their needs. From voice of customer research and user testing to A/B test ideation and development, Amber brings together the creative and analytical sides of marketing to create experiences that drive better conversion rates, leads, sales, and profitability.
Annie Maguire
Conversion Copywriter
Annie has been a copywriter for 12 years, starting her career at agencies like 360i and _Narrative writing copy for some of the world’s biggest brands — Smirnoff, Guinness, L’Oreal, Unilever, Samsung, Under Armour and others.
9 years ago, she decided to strike out on her own, focusing on conversion copywriting for websites and in 2019, she came on board with Decoder.
Since then, she’s worked with clients of all shapes and sizes, helping them hone their value propositions, build trust, and turn traffic into leads and sales.
Every day is bring your values to work day.
We live by our values. Every decision — from who we hire to which projects we take on and how we run them — is made using our core values. Whether you’re considering working with us or for us, values alignment is paramount.
Make an impact.
Act with integrity.
We believe in honesty and transparency in all aspects of our business—from the way we work and communicate with clients to the way we deal with employees. It’s not just the right thing to do; it’s a better a way to do business.
Stay curious.
Our innate curiosity drives us to think through a client’s goals, put ourselves in the shoes of their customer, and consider what truly matters to them. It drives us to continually test out new strategies, tools, and approaches.
Engineered for your ROI.
Hands-on help from the best in the business
No long term contracts — just long term partnerships
Proven processes for driving traffic, conversion & ROI
Our origin story.
Decoder was founded in 2011 to take a results-driven approach to helping clients improve their marketing ROI. For the past 13 years, we’ve developed and refined our processes based on real world experience with hundreds of clients across diverse industries.
We’ve found what consistently works — and what common pitfalls to avoid.
Most importantly, we’ve found that it’s critical to hire, nurture, and retain highly experienced, specialized talent. Our team members have more than 10 years of experience each and it can’t be overemphasized how important that is. The real value an agency offers is always its people — their expertise, passion, creativity, and drive are the biggest predictors of success.
Likewise, we’re careful to only take on clients with a clear line of sight to ROI. We rely on driving meaningful results month-after-month to earn our clients’ business, so if we don’t think there’s a strong probability that we’ll have a successful relationship, we won’t work with you. And we’ve found that clients actually like hearing that, even when it means pointing them in another direction.
At the end of the day, your ROI is our north star. It guides every process we’ve developed and every decision we make: from the team we’ve handpicked to the processes we’ve developed to where we focus our efforts and the data-driven decisions we make.
At the start of every engagement, we ask: how can we double our clients’ leads, sales, and revenue? Matching an ambitious vision for your growth with relentless experimentation and curiosity sets us up to hit home runs. Once we’ve gotten the broad strokes right, that focus shifts to making what we’re doing more efficient and profitable, unlocking a virtuous cycle of increasing profitability and scale.
Sound like a fit? Let’s talk.
Our proven approach has helped clients of all shapes and sizes.
From Silicon Valley start-ups to Fortune 500 stalwarts to local businesses and non-profits, our approach has been proven across manufacturing, health care, retail, finance, energy, software, education, and beyond.
Ready to be our next case study?
Book a free strategy session with our CEO. We’ll give you a candid assessment of your most promising opportunities for growth and whether or not we’re a good fit for your needs. We don’t do long-term contracts, so we’ll only take you on if there’s a clear path to ROI.
Benjamin Wills
CEO
Portland, OR
Ben will get back to you within 24 hours.
