Increase your ROI — and not just your traffic — with data-driven paid social advertising.
Discover how our customer-centric approach can supercharge your paid social advertising campaigns. From precise targeting to optimizing ad spend, we leverage cutting-edge analytics and customer research to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.
Trusted By
Results your ROI can feel.
Our paid social advertising goes beyond audience targeting and creative development to align each touch point with your customers’ decision-making process and psychology, yielding better engagement, conversion, and ROI across diverse industries.
When do you need a paid social advertising agency?
If you’re struggling with narrowing your targeting down, watching your budget disappear without producing meaningful results, or hitting a performance plateau, you’re not alone. Paid social can be frustratingly opaque and complex, making it hard to manage when you’re juggling other channels and priorities.
Having a proactive partner with deep expertise and dedicated bandwidth to tackle these challenges can open up bottlenecks. Our all senior level team combines in-depth customer research, sophisticated analytics, creative testing, and real world experience from hundreds of campaigns to optimize your paid social advertising spend.
Combine that with an unwavering commitment to our clients’ success and total transparency about what’s working and what’s not, and you’ll see why we have such an exceptional track record of delivering results.
If you’re ready to engage with a long-term, trusted partner to help unlock the full potential of paid social advertising, get in touch.
QUICK PAID SOCIAL AUDIT
Ask yourself these questions to see if your paid social campaigns are running on all cylinders:
- Are your social media ads driving traffic, but failing to convert visitors into customers or leads?
- Are you seeing an insufficient return on ad spend or improvements over time?
- Do you need a more data-driven approach to understand what’s not working and improve your advertising results?
Comprehensive paid social advertising services.
The traditional paid social approach based on impressions and engagement isn’t enough to ensure a meaningful ROI. Today’s customers expect to see ads that are deeply aligned with their interests, needs, and decision-making processes. Here’s how we do it:
Strategic Alignment
Every engagement begins with gaining insights into your business, offerings, goals, customers, and market. From there, a comprehensive strategy is crafted, outlining the campaign’s objectives, budget, timeline, and OKRs (objectives and key results), so we can clearly measure our success.
Audience Research
We conduct thorough research to identify relevant, high-converting customer segments along demographic, psychographic, location, and behavioral dimensions. We’ll then recommend audience targets and the best channels for reaching them.
Budget Allocation
We always allocate budget across platforms, ad sets, and campaigns based on performance to make sure your dollars are used as effectively as possible and recommend allowing for a high degree of fluidity. We also employ bidding strategies tailored to each campaign to maximize its outputs.
Conversion Tracking
To measure the campaign’s effectiveness, we’ll make sure your conversion tracking focuses on the most important contributors to end business outcomes, such as form submissions, purchases, or sign-ups. Setting up custom integrations to pull in e-commerce data, push lead sources into your CRM, and otherwise enable end outcome reporting is often key.
A/B Testing
Reporting
We monitor performance multiple times per week and provide regular reports on key metrics and with actionable recommendations customized to your unique needs. Successful strategies are scaled up to increase reach and impact, while underperforming ones are refined or paused.
Search Engine Optimization
3.5 billion searches happen every day. Get found by potential customers looking for exactly what you offer with tried-and-true methods that don’t just drive more traffic — they also drive measurable growth in sales, leads, and revenue.
Paid Search Advertising
We use the same data-driven approach as we do with paid social to find profitable and scalable opportunities to reach new customers wherever they are — including Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, programmatic advertising, and retargeting.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Building a customer-centric site lays the best possible foundation for your success, but you’re leaving money on the table if you don’t continually work to turn more and more of your traffic into customers.
Paid social isn't all we do — it's just the start.
Engineered for your ROI.
Hands-on help from the best in the business
No long term contracts — just long term partnerships
We don’t lock clients into long term contracts; instead, we earn their business by growing their marketing ROI month-after-month.
Proven processes for driving traffic, conversion & ROI
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.
Frequently asked questions:
What differentiates Decoder from other ad agencies?
Most paid social agencies focus on impressions, engagement, likes, clicks, and other leading indicators that don’t necessarily translate to top-line revenue or bottom-line profitability. By contrast, we are relentlessly focused on those end outcomes and make sure there’s a clear ROI for everything we do.
A unique part of how we do that is by delving deep into your customers’ psychology to align our efforts with what they care about most. Every engagement begins with one-on-one “voice of customer” interviews, talking to your sales and other customer facing staff, gather extensive analytics and behavioral data, and validating all of our recommendations through testing.
It’s a more involved process, but the long-term results are worth it and most clients stick with us for years. If you’re wondering what it’s like to work with us, we recommend talking to our clients to get a firsthand take on their experiences.
What's the typical timeline for a paid social engagement?
If you already have paid social campaigns running and performing at an acceptable level, we’re happy to take those over while we work on a more strategic approach so there’s no gap in sales or lead flow. Typically, it takes us 4 – 6 weeks to conduct our research and build out our new campaigns. From there, we focus on ongoing optimization and testing to drive both incremental improvements as well as exploring bigger changes such as new campaign types, audience segments, and channels.
We break our projects into three phases:
- Research & Strategy – Everything starts with a deep dive (and we mean deep) into your business, customers, current site, data, market research, competition, and more. Ideally, this includes involves interviewing your customers and customer-facing staff, analyzing user behavior on your current site, defining the customer journey, and developing a message map that aligns with that journey. The result is an advertising brief that ensures our ads are effective and show a marked improvement over existing campaigns from the get-go.
- Account Build-Out & Creative Development – This is where all of our recommendations and ideas get translated into building out campaigns, targeting, ads, and settings for each platform. If you have a creative team in place, we’re happy to collaborate on design, copy, video production, and more. If you don’t, we can develop ads for you in alignment with your brand guidelines and using available assets. Once we launch our new campaigns, we typically see a significant uplift in conversions and cost efficiency within the first few weeks compared to prior performance.
- Ongoing Optimization & Testing – Once the new campaigns are launched and collecting data, we continuously optimize performance to more accurately target people who are likely to convert, improve our ad creative, test landing page improvements, and trial new campaign types, bid strategies, and even platforms.
How much do you charge?
We work on a fixed monthly retainer based on the complexity of your account and how frequently it needs to be optimized. We don’t do a percentage of ad spend as we feel that puts incentives in the wrong places and because increased ad spend doesn’t always require increased management time.
Typically, our retainers range from $2,000 – $4,000 per month per channel (e.g. Facebook & Instagram Ads, or LinkedIn Ads, or YouTube Ads, etc.). To ensure our efforts are profitable, we recommend keeping a healthy balance of ad spend versus management fees, so you should generally be spending at least $5,000 per month or more on advertising to warrant working together.
Please get in touch with us to schedule a discovery call and we can usually provide a ballpark range based on that initial consult. Additional due diligence may be needed, especially for more complex needs.
Who will we be working with on your team?
We have a small, tight knit team and take on a limited number of clients at any given time to make sure they can give their full attention to each project. You will primarily be working with a senior level ad specialist directly managing your account, along with a copywriter and a designer providing creative services if needed. Our CEO is involved in every project and works closely with the lead strategist to ensure your goals and our processes, timelines, and resources are aligned. We don’t have an entry level people and turnover is rare, so you can expect a high degree of expertise, service, and continuity over the course of years.
Have you worked with clients in our industry before?
We’ve worked with hundreds of businesses over the past 13 years, so the chances are high that we’ve worked with other clients in your industry. Check out our case studies for a cross-section of some of the businesses we’ve helped.
Whether or not we’ve worked with a similar business, we insist on treating each client and project individually. No two businesses are the same and a one-size-fits-all approach is a surefire path to mediocrity. Understanding and conveying your brand’s unique value to customers is what sets your website — and our work — apart from the rest of the pack.
What resources are required on the client's end and how much time will we need to dedicate?
Having an internal champion for the engagement on your end is always key, particularly in the first month or so while we’re doing our research and building out new campaigns. After that first phase, you can expect to dedicate 1-to-2 hours per week (or less depending on the complexity of the engagement and our meeting frequency) managing our relationship. Some clients are more hands-on or hands-off and we’re happy to work as autonomously or collaboratively as you desire, as long as we’re able to get the resources and approvals we need to run effective campaigns.
Can you work with our in-house or contract designers, developers, copywriters, etc.?
Yes, with two major caveats.
While we’re happy to collaborate with your internal or already contracted resources, they will need to have the necessary bandwidth to take on the project. If you have any reservations about their capacity, please err on the side of caution and give them a pass. Everyone will be happier and more successful as a result.
Likewise, we will need to have the authority to assign them tasks while you hold them accountable to ensure they produce quality work. If that sounds uncomfortable or unrealistic, again, please give the lovely folks on your team a pass. Everyone will be happier in the long run.
Ready to be our next case study?
Book a free strategy session with our CEO and we’ll give you a candid assessment of your most promising opportunities for growth as well as whether or not we’re a good fit for your needs.
Benjamin Wills
CEO
Portland, OR
Ben will get back to you within 24 hours.
