Search engine marketing that gets you in front of buyers right when they need you.
Trusted By
Results that speak for themselves.
When do you need a specialized SEM agency?
If you’re spending (or ready to spend) $4,000 a month or more on pay-per-click ads, then you need someone proactively managing your campaigns every week to make sure you get a positive ROI.
SEM management isn’t rocket science, but it takes consistent effort and experience to get the keywords right, create compelling ads, build high performance landing pages, and make the most of your data to get customers at the lowest possible cost.
With Google, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, display, and more at your fingertips, it’s also important to figure out how to spend your budget where it’s most effective.
Finally, while fine-tuning traffic is crucial, it’s equally important to improve the experience your customers have when getting to your site. Testing your landing pages against each other can dramatically improve the rate at which visitors turn into customers — increasing leads and sales while dropping costs.
QUICK SEM AUDIT
Ask yourself these questions to see if you’re taking full advantage of everything SEM has to offer:
- Are you getting clicks that turn into actual leads or sales?
- How much of your spend is wasted on people who don’t convert?
- Are you making money on PPC, just breaking even, or taking a loss?
- Have you hit a performance ceiling that you can’t seem to break through?
SEM strategy and execution from end-to-end.
Search engine marketing is more than just keywords. It doesn’t matter whether it’s AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or the Google Ad Network (including YouTube). A full PPC strategy has a lot of moving parts, and we’ve got a full toolbox to get you results on any network.
Keyword Research
Campaign Buildout
Account Optimization
If you’ve ever pulled up a PPC dashboard, then you know it can get very complicated, very quickly. We thrive on those intricate details and use them to build a well-oiled PPC machine.
Retargeting
Landing Pages
Analytics & Reporting
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 Social Advertising
We use the same data-driven approach as we do with paid search to find profitable and scalable opportunities to reach new customers wherever they are — including Facebook and Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads, YouTube Ads, and more.
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 search isn't all we do — it's just the start.
Engineered for your ROI.
Our agency was designed from the ground up to deliver results: we hire all senior-level talent, only take on projects with a clear line of sight to revenue, and insist on validating everything we do with data. We get big wins quickly and increase efficiency over time to unlock a virtuous cycle of profitable, scalable customer acquisition.
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 search agencies get the broad strokes right, but lack the deep expertise, customer centric approach, and relentless focus on results translate into greater efficiency and revenue month-after-month.
By contrast, we employ an all senior level team, use a proprietary process to understand what drives your customers’ decision-making, and make sure there’s a clear ROI for everything we do.
Our team members average 10 years of experience in their field each. When you engage with us, you’ll work directly with an expert, not an account or project manager. That ensures not only a higher level of service and knowledgable answers to all your questions, but even more importantly that we can collaborate on to find the best approach to meeting your goals without anything getting lost in translation.
Another unique aspect of our approach is that we delve deep into your customers’ psychology to align our targeting, messaging, offers, and landing pages 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, and gathering analytics and behavioral data. We likewise test all of our recommendations to validate them, rather than relying on the “guess-and-check” approach.
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 search engagement?
If you already have paid search 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 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 ad creative that aligns with that journey. The result is a 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 copy, graphics, landing pages, and more. If you don’t, we can develop ads for you in alignment with your brand guidelines, using our messaging strategy to ensure they’re on-target. 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. 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 $4,000 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.
