I'm thinking about hiring a PPC Expert from Elance.com

I am thinking about hiring an expert PPC team from elance.com and I wanted to hear from people that have or are already doing this.

Please share your experiences; what can I expect; what should I think about; what would you do differently in thinking back?

I found someone that has 50% repeat customers and 100% 5 stars / positive feedback and they are top 5% in adwords. How much do they normally charge per month (no including the actual budget for the adwords/PPC promotions) ?

Personally, I would just be very skeptical of this, if you can make good returns with adwords, why would you do anything else except build your own sites and offers?

Why would anyone make money for someone else, if they can run same PPC campaigns with their accounts and make a lot more?

Anyway, my point is I doubt the quality of potential freelancers work

What a bad place for hiring experts

Panther28 said:

Personally, I would just be very skeptical of this, if you can make good returns with adwords, why would you do anything else except build your own sites and offers?

Click to expand...

Maybe THAT is their business and how they choice to make money from it.

There are VERY good agencies out there that make a mint offering these sorts of services.

Would you be skeptical about a online marketing company ranking number 2 or 3 for the word "SEO services" and "SEO" ?

Thanks for your input!

Never thought about getting somebody hired as PPC expert at the sources of people like you mentioned. I would say Forums are the best place to get people like that.

No offence guys - but I'd rather hear from people with ACTUAL experience and not people that "fear" the worst.

imperial444 said:

Never thought about getting somebody hired as PPC expert at the sources of people like you mentioned. I would say Forums are the best place to get people like that.

Click to expand...

Problem with forums is that there is no protection. At least with elance.com I can put in place milestones and realease funds when they are reached or use escrow.

Ignore those saying people who know PPC would run it themselves. It's not that simple.

If you know what you're doing, you can make way more managing a couple of million dollar a month spend clients than you would on your own sites, without all the hassle of running a business.

In terms of what you would be expecting to pay, most will charge a setup fee (although usually minimal if you have a reasonable budget) and then a % of your monthly spend. Obviously it's in their best interests for you to be profitable so you end up spending more as well. If you have a decent budget ($5k+ a month) then expect to pay *around* 10% of spend with a minimum contract of 6 months.

Thanks for your input!

I think I'm going to start of small and just test the waters with a $1k budget. If it goes well I'll scale it up.

Hire on freelancer.com , i have seen some people posting similar projects also there were much people biding on Project !

What a bad place for hiring experts

Click to expand...

Actualy, Elance is probably the best place to hire an expert. Why do I say this? Cause I hired 100+ people there. Engineers, designers, writers, slaves (guys doing admin jobs), programers etc etc...

SkyrocketSEO said:

Actualy, Elance is probably the best place to hire an expert. Why do I say this? Cause I hired 100+ people there. Engineers, designers, writers, slaves (guys doing admin jobs), programers etc etc...

Click to expand...

nvm....

nvm No.2

I am also in the same boat.
I have looked at some of the best PPC providers and i am discussing with 1 of the shortlisted.
Some of the PPC managers are ex-google employees. - That might be handy as well.
Apart from that, no offense, but i try to avoid Americans for this job.
Because, PPC is all about refining and many of the americans i have talked to are more interested over the money than quality of work.
They clearly state that they will only work few hours for $500.
Which makes it ridiculous as that few hours will be just nice to do a perfect ad copy/settings keyword selection but not enough to measure or analyze ROI which is more important!
So, i had picked a female Indian from ELANCE top 5.
She is not cheap either but her reviews are glowing and she seems like the one who will put in hours to your campaign to make sure it turns our profitable.

Elance is a great place to find experts for a variety of things as stated above. Just be prepared to interview...interview...interview. I have hired several people on Elance and they each came with hours of interviews.

I remember the first hire I made to design a wordpress theme, they literally just copied the code of another theme and renamed it. I got my money back haha.

I am in the PPC management game and I charge a larger percentage for smaller accounts.

If I were you with a $1k/month budget I would be expecting to pay between $150-300/month to manage that. Where as a $10k/month budget would only pay $1000.

Why is it a larger percentage for smaller accounts?

It takes virtually the same amount of work to manage smaller accounts as it does to manage the larger accounts. Because of this we charge a higher percentage for smaller budgets to help make a decent hourly rate on those smaller.

IamNRE said:

Thanks for your input!

I think I'm going to start of small and just test the waters with a $1k budget. If it goes well I'll scale it up.

Click to expand...

Is it possible for you to talk to their old customers on EL?. There are companies here that offer their service, usually it s at a flat rate, or a percentage of the spend. It s expensive to hire someone for this, and if you know how to do it correctly you can literally name your price. Many businesses get all their traffic online, and are happy to spend $5000 each month and make back $15,000.

If you want to do it yourself, set up a small SEO company website, and contact Engage for Google. Let the know that you are a new service company starting out, and you want to register. They will call and talk to you on the phone, you spiel is that you started building websites for friends and family, it snow balled and is turning into a business, and you want to do it professionally. I got approved quite easily.

If you get accepted you will be eligible to take the official course and get certified in providing PPC services.

This training is free, and you get a Google certification, as well as a through, if basic, understanding of adwords PPC best practices and system.

If you decide to use a vendor, you can tell a little about them by asking a few questions. How often do they personally look at your campaigns? What tools do they use? Do they split test? Do they tweak ads? It must be watched like a hawk, and you must track and tweak everything, and split testing and tweaking never stops.

If they do not know this, drop them as a candidate.

With PPC you have to get your ad to work in converting viewers to visitors, then you have to get your landing age to convert these visitors into customers. Keep your spend low until the ad really starts converting. The day your ad is finally working, you will get a rush of traffic, and if your landing page is not converting yet, you will spend every dime in your account if you are not careful.

After you ads are converting, drive at least 1000 (a few thousand is better) people to your site and look at the conversion rate. If you did not get a 1% conversion rate something is wrong, generally speaking.so you might you need to work on the landing page.

The person running your campaign needs to understand ad groups, quality score, and how to analyze the tracking information. They need to know to stop a campaign that does not do well in the evening, and restart it in the morning before the lunch crowd if that campaign wastes money at night but converts during the lunch break.

They need to understand that you want maximum exposure, not the top spot, and adjust your campaign accordingly, Often the 3rd spot will out perform the top two, and your ad will advance up the list as the other customers spend for the day expires anyway. You do not need to buy your ads for a premium price, you get charged by the click.

Good luck

Techxan said:

Is it possible for you to talk to their old customers on EL?. There are companies here that offer their service, usually it s at a flat rate, or a percentage of the spend. It s expensive to hire someone for this, and if you know how to do it correctly you can literally name your price. Many businesses get all their traffic online, and are happy to spend $5000 each month and make back $15,000.

If you want to do it yourself, set up a small SEO company website, and contact Engage for Google. Let the know that you are a new service company starting out, and you want to register. They will call and talk to you on the phone, you spiel is that you started building websites for friends and family, it snow balled and is turning into a business, and you want to do it professionally. I got approved quite easily.

If you get accepted you will be eligible to take the official course and get certified in providing PPC services.

This training is free, and you get a Google certification, as well as a through, if basic, understanding of adwords PPC best practices and system.

If you decide to use a vendor, you can tell a little about them by asking a few questions. How often do they personally look at your campaigns? What tools do they use? Do they split test? Do they tweak ads? It must be watched like a hawk, and you must track and tweak everything, and split testing and tweaking never stops.

If they do not know this, drop them as a candidate.

With PPC you have to get your ad to work in converting viewers to visitors, then you have to get your landing age to convert these visitors into customers. Keep your spend low until the ad really starts converting. The day your ad is finally working, you will get a rush of traffic, and if your landing page is not converting yet, you will spend every dime in your account if you are not careful.

After you ads are converting, drive at least 1000 (a few thousand is better) people to your site and look at the conversion rate. If you did not get a 1% conversion rate something is wrong, generally speaking.so you might you need to work on the landing page.

The person running your campaign needs to understand ad groups, quality score, and how to analyze the tracking information. They need to know to stop a campaign that does not do well in the evening, and restart it in the morning before the lunch crowd if that campaign wastes money at night but converts during the lunch break.

They need to understand that you want maximum exposure, not the top spot, and adjust your campaign accordingly, Often the 3rd spot will out perform the top two, and your ad will advance up the list as the other customers spend for the day expires anyway. You do not need to buy your ads for a premium price, you get charged by the click.

Good luck

Click to expand...

Thank you Techxan! That's really useful!!! My rep. is used up for the day. Thank you very much for your insight!

Hey IamNRE I just got an Adwords manager on board and I am trying to expand my portfolio. He is pretty good at it. If you want I can hook you up with him and maybe he can do it for free if you want. Let me if you ( or anyone here ) would be interested. More than happy to help a fellow BHW member out