The Portland PPC agency
that owns the number.
Google Ads, Meta, and programmatic — run by the same people who built your tracking, your landing pages, and your BigQuery attribution. Ad-Apt has managed paid media for 50+ brands since 2011, including Circle K, Netflix, Teton Gravity Research, Boss PDX, True Blue Car Wash, and TastyTrade. Up to 7x ROAS on DTC accounts. Daily conversion data into your warehouse, not a weekly screenshot.
Most Portland PPC agencies are running 2018 playbooks.
Smart Bidding has eaten manual CPC. Performance Max has eaten Shopping. Advantage+ has eaten lookalikes. iOS 14.5 and the Privacy Sandbox have eaten the browser pixel. The agency that wins your account in 2026 is not the one with the prettiest deck — it is the one that already built server-side conversion tracking, runs a creative production pipeline that can ship ten variants a week, and feeds first-party data back into Google and Meta so the bidding algorithms actually have something to learn from.
Ad-Apt is a Portland PPC agency headquartered in Lake Oswego. We run paid search, paid social, and programmatic for enterprise and mid-market brands across Oregon and the United States. We are not a single-channel shop and we are not a creative studio that also dabbles in media. We solve for performance — the number on the spreadsheet that the CFO uses to decide whether marketing keeps its budget next quarter.
If you are searching for ppc management portland or google ads agency portland, here is what we actually do and what to expect.
Every paid channel under one team.
No reseller arrangements, no white-labeled subcontractors. The strategist on your account also pushes the bids, writes the headlines, and reads the BigQuery query that proves it worked.
Google Ads — Search, Performance Max, Shopping, Demand Gen, YouTube
Search campaigns are still the highest-intent media that money can buy. We build them the way they should be built: tight thematic ad groups, RSAs with pinned brand language, negative-keyword harvesting weekly, and search-term reports actually read by a human. Performance Max is treated as its own beast — we feed it clean product feeds via Merchant Center, lock asset groups to themes (not "everything in one bucket"), and use the brand-exclusion lever Google quietly shipped so PMax stops cannibalizing branded search. Shopping for ecommerce, Demand Gen for upper-funnel discovery, YouTube for awareness when the math supports it.
Meta Ads — Facebook, Instagram, Advantage+ Shopping, CAPI server-side
Meta in 2026 is a creative-volume game with an algorithm layer on top. We run Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns as the primary scaling vehicle for DTC, bundle aspects per ad rather than splitting one creative angle per ad (a pattern most agencies still get wrong), and ship Meta CAPI with deduplicated event IDs so iOS users actually attribute. The Carcin Connector WordPress plugin we wrote handles server-side Lead and Purchase events for clients on WordPress; everywhere else we deploy via server-side Google Tag Manager on Cloudflare Workers.
Programmatic and DSP — DV360, The Trade Desk, retail media
When the brand needs reach Google and Meta cannot supply — CTV, premium publisher inventory, Amazon and Walmart sponsored placements, or first-party retail audiences — we run programmatic through DV360 and The Trade Desk. We do not buy programmatic on a CPM and call it a campaign. Every DSP line item ties back to a measurable outcome: store visits, e-commerce purchases, qualified leads, or assisted conversions in the attribution model.
Attribution and measurement — server-side conversions, GA4, BigQuery, cookieless future
This is the part most Portland PPC agencies skip because it is engineering work, not media buying. We deploy server-side GTM on Cloudflare Workers, wire Enhanced Conversions and Meta CAPI with hashed first-party data, stream GA4 events into BigQuery daily, and build attribution models that survive the death of the third-party cookie. Read our take on cookieless attribution if you want the long version.
Creative production — in-house renderer, fast iteration, ACT-Easy fonts
Creative fatigue is the single largest hidden tax on Meta and YouTube performance. We solved it by building a creative renderer in-house: 5 template families, 23 layout variants, ACT Easy typography across the system, and the ability to push ten new ad variations to Meta in an afternoon — not three weeks. The same renderer powers a brand photo library with 83 AI-tagged photos for our Circle K accounts. When the algorithm asks for fresh creative, we ship it the same day.
Reporting buyers can actually run on — weekly account health, monthly board-level
Two reports go out, every cycle, on time. The weekly account health report is a one-page operator view: spend, CAC, ROAS, search impression share, anomalies, and the three things changing this week. The monthly executive report is built for the leadership team or the board: pipeline contribution, blended efficiency, channel mix, and a forward plan. Both are generated by agentic monitoring that runs across our portfolio — not a Looker dashboard nobody opens.
The accounts behind the claim.
A handful of engagements where the paid-media number moved enough that the client let us write about it.
Circle K — CleanFreak & Rainstorm
Enterprise car-wash brands at thousands of locations across the United States. We run Google Ads, Meta, and programmatic across two regional sub-brands, with agentic monitoring that ships a combined weekly Google + Meta report to ownership every Monday. Server-side CAPI live on both brands as of May 2026.
Read case study →Teton Gravity Research
DTC Shopify scale for the iconic action-sports brand. Paid social and paid search rebuilt around clean conversion signal and creative iteration. Result: a 500% increase in online sales and sustained 7x ROAS at scale during launch windows.
Read case study →Netflix — Griselda
Title-launch performance support for one of Netflix's most-watched limited series of the year. Audience targeting and creative iteration tied to streaming-era completion and retention KPIs, not pure click metrics.
Read case study →Boss PDX
Local Portland service business taken from zero to $1M in annual revenue with paid + SEO + lifecycle. Proof that the same paid-media discipline that scales enterprise accounts also works for an SMB that is willing to commit to a 12-month plan.
Read case study →The case in five lines.
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01
Paid media plus engineering.The team running your ads also wrote the server-side container, the BigQuery export, and the Cloudflare Worker that handles your offline conversion imports. Nothing is thrown over a wall.
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02
First-party data is the default.Server-side GTM, Meta CAPI, Enhanced Conversions, hashed CRM uploads, and customer-match audiences are deployed on day one — not pitched as a phase-two upsell.
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03
Creative volume, not creative theater.Our in-house renderer ships ad variants in an afternoon. We do not let creative production become the bottleneck that starves the bidding algorithm of fresh signal.
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04
Real reports, on time.Weekly account-health and monthly board-level reporting are automated through our agentic monitoring stack. The CFO gets the same number we do, the same day.
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05
Outcomes, not impressions.CAC, ROAS, pipeline, and contribution margin. If a channel does not move one of those numbers in 90 days, we kill it and reallocate. We have done it on our own accounts. We will do it on yours.
Audit, plan, ship, review.
No 90-day "discovery phase" before anything moves. PPC accounts decay every week they are not touched, and we are not in the business of selling discovery.
Audit
We open your Google Ads, Meta Business Manager, GA4, and BigQuery (if it exists), and tell you what is broken. Tracking gaps, wasted spend, missing negatives, conflicting attribution, dead campaigns still serving.
- Account structure review
- Conversion tracking integrity check
- 90-day spend efficiency analysis
Plan
Channel mix, budget allocation, target CAC and ROAS, creative requirements, and an explicit list of what we are killing and what we are launching. Approved in a 45-minute call, not a 30-page deck.
- Server-side tracking deployment plan
- Quarterly creative production roadmap
- Attribution model and reporting cadence
Ship
Campaigns live, server-side GTM deployed, CAPI verified processing events, creative renderer producing the first batch, BigQuery export running daily. Most accounts see baseline performance match or beat prior agency inside 60 days.
- All channels launched in priority order
- Conversion data verified end-to-end
- Weekly review cadence begins
Review
Weekly account-health report on Monday. Monthly executive report on the first business day of each month. Quarterly business review with leadership in person or on Zoom. Honest answers when something is not working.
- Weekly agentic monitoring alerts
- Monthly portfolio-level reporting
- Quarterly creative refresh cycle
What Portland PPC buyers actually ask.
How is PPC pricing structured at Ad-Apt?+
Every engagement is scoped against pipeline targets, not industry averages. Management is structured as a retainer, percent of ad spend, or hybrid depending on volume and channel count. Talk to a strategist for a tailored proposal.
How should I think about ad spend?+
We size spend against pipeline targets and CAC math. If conversion rate and lifetime value require a certain monthly volume to hit a meaningful pipeline number, smaller budgets will only validate that the math does not yet work. We will tell you honestly where the floor is before you commit.
How long until PPC breaks even?+
Search campaigns with existing demand and clean conversion tracking can break even inside 30-60 days. Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Meta Advantage+ typically need 6-8 weeks for the algorithm to converge on profitable signal. Programmatic and YouTube are 90-120 day plays. Anyone promising profitability in week one is either lying or is going to pause everything that does not convert immediately and call the rest an optimization.
Do you run Meta Ads and Google Ads together?+
Yes, and we strongly prefer it. Google captures demand that already exists; Meta and programmatic create it. Running them in isolation is how accounts end up with declining search impression share and no idea why. Both sit inside the same attribution model and the same weekly account review.
Do you implement server-side conversion tracking and Meta CAPI?+
Yes. Server-side conversions and Meta CAPI are the default deployment for new accounts, not an upsell. iOS 14.5, ITP, and the cookieless transition broke browser-only pixels years ago. We ship Google Tag Manager server-side containers on Cloudflare Workers, Meta CAPI with deduplicated event IDs, and offline conversion imports for CRM-stage events. The Carcin Connector plugin (our own software) handles WordPress-side CAPI for Ninja Forms and WooCommerce. More on the underlying approach in our cookieless attribution writeup.
Do you white-label PPC for other agencies?+
Yes, on a limited basis. We white-label Google Ads and Meta Ads management for creative-led and SEO-led agencies in the Pacific Northwest that need a senior paid team without hiring one. Engagements are billed under NDA and reporting is delivered under the parent agency's brand.
The rest of the growth stack.
PPC alone is rarely the entire answer. The agencies that hold the line on performance in 2026 also own the landing pages, the attribution, and the lifecycle motion downstream.
Grow audience
SEO, AEO, paid search, paid social, and programmatic as a single practice. Paid feeds organic and the other way around.
Learn more →Convert visitors
Landing-page systems, CRO, and funnel engineering. The fastest PPC win in most accounts is the page, not the bid.
Learn more →Measure what matters
GA4, BigQuery, server-side tracking, and executive dashboards. Numbers an operator can run on.
Learn more →Parent: Portland Marketing Agency
The full Portland services overview — web, paid, SEO, AEO, CRM, and analytics under one roof.
Back to overview →Tell us what is not
scaling profitably.
Ten-minute intro call. Bring your last 90 days of Google Ads or Meta data and we will tell you, on the call, where the spend is leaking. No deck. No retainer pitch unless you ask.
Talk to a paid-media strategist