Last updated: February 9, 2026 | Reading time: 18 minutes
If you have been researching Google Ads management, you have probably noticed a pattern. Agency pricing is easy to find. Every agency publishes their rates or at least a "starting from" number. But freelancer pricing? It is all over the place. One person on Upwork quotes $25 an hour. A consultant you found on LinkedIn wants $3,000 a month. Someone in a Reddit thread says they charge 15% of ad spend. And none of them explain what you actually get for that money.
This is not an accident. Freelancers keep their pricing opaque because the market is fragmented and most of them are figuring it out as they go. A 2025 survey of PPC freelancers found that over 60% changed their pricing model at least once in their first two years. The result is a market where you, the advertiser, have almost no way to compare apples to apples.
We are going to fix that. This is the most detailed breakdown of Google Ads freelancer costs you will find anywhere in 2026. Not just the sticker price, but what that price actually buys, how much of your freelancer's time you really get, what the hidden costs and risks are, and how the whole model compares to the alternatives.
Google Ads freelancers use four main pricing models, and each one creates different incentives and different problems.
Hourly billing is the most transparent model. Rates in 2026 range from $25 per hour for entry-level freelancers on platforms like Upwork and Fiverr to $200 or more per hour for experienced specialists with proven track records and Google certifications. The median sits around $75 to $100 per hour for a competent freelancer in the US, UK, or Western Europe. Offshore freelancers from Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, or Latin America charge $15 to $50 per hour.
The hourly model gives you clarity on what you are paying per unit of time, but it tells you nothing about what that time produces. A $25 per hour freelancer who takes 20 hours to do what a $150 per hour expert does in 4 hours costs you more and delivers worse results. And the incentive structure is backwards: the freelancer earns more by working slowly, not by working well.
In practice, most hourly-billed freelancers commit 5 to 15 hours per month to a Google Ads account. At $75 per hour, that puts your monthly cost at $375 to $1,125. At $150 per hour, it is $750 to $2,250. You need to ask how those hours are allocated and what deliverables you can expect, because "5 hours of Google Ads management" can mean very different things depending on who is doing the work.
Monthly retainer is the most common model for ongoing management. Retainers for Google Ads freelancers in 2026 typically range from $500 to $3,000 per month, with some high-end consultants charging $5,000 or more for enterprise accounts.
Here is where those ranges actually sit by experience level. Junior freelancers with less than two years of experience and a handful of clients charge $500 to $1,000 per month. They are often managing 15 to 25 accounts simultaneously to make a viable living. Mid-level freelancers with three to five years of experience and a solid portfolio charge $1,000 to $2,000 per month. They typically manage 8 to 15 clients. Senior specialists with five or more years, deep Google Ads expertise, case studies, and possibly Google Partner status charge $2,000 to $5,000 per month. They tend to manage 4 to 8 clients and offer more strategic involvement.
The retainer model gives you cost predictability, but it is essentially an all-you-can-eat arrangement where the freelancer decides how much they eat. Most retainers do not specify a minimum number of hours, and even when they do, the hours are self-reported. Unless you are watching over their shoulder (which defeats the purpose of hiring someone), you are trusting that the freelancer allocates adequate time to your account.
Percentage of ad spend mirrors the agency model but at lower rates. Freelancers typically charge 10% to 15% of your monthly ad spend, compared to the 10% to 20% that agencies charge. On $5,000 in monthly spend, that works out to $500 to $750. On $20,000, it is $2,000 to $3,000.
The structural problem with this model is identical to the agency version: the freelancer makes more money when you spend more, regardless of whether that extra spend improves your results. A freelancer earning 12% of a $20,000 budget takes home $2,400. If they recommend increasing your budget to $30,000 and performance stays flat, they now earn $3,600. Their incentive is to grow your spend, not your profit.
Project-based or setup fees apply to initial campaign builds, audits, or one-time restructuring. Campaign setup fees range from $250 for a simple single-campaign build to $3,500 or more for complex multi-campaign structures with extensive keyword research, competitor analysis, and conversion tracking setup. Account audits typically cost $150 to $1,000 depending on account size and depth of analysis.
For most small to mid-size advertisers in 2026, the realistic all-in cost of a competent Google Ads freelancer works out to $1,000 to $2,500 per month on an ongoing basis. That is cheaper than an agency (which typically runs $1,500 to $5,000 or more for the same account size), but it is still a meaningful expense, especially when you look at what that money actually buys.
This is where the uncomfortable reality sets in. You are paying $1,500 a month. What does that buy?
Let us work through the math. A mid-level freelancer charging $1,500 per month at an effective rate of $100 per hour is allocating roughly 15 hours per month to your account. That sounds reasonable until you break down how those hours actually get spent.
Account review and performance monitoring: 3 to 5 hours per month. The freelancer logs into your Google Ads account, reviews key metrics (spend, CPA, ROAS, conversion rates), checks for anomalies, and looks at trends. This typically happens 2 to 3 times per week, with each session lasting 20 to 45 minutes. Some freelancers do this daily for their larger accounts, others weekly for smaller ones.
Bid and budget adjustments: 2 to 3 hours per month. Based on the performance review, the freelancer adjusts bids on underperforming or overperforming keywords, reallocates budget between campaigns, and tweaks bidding strategy parameters. In 2026, with Google's Smart Bidding handling auction-time adjustments, much of this work is about setting and adjusting targets rather than manual bid changes.
Search term review and negative keywords: 1 to 2 hours per month. The freelancer reviews the search terms report, identifies irrelevant queries, and adds negative keywords. Most freelancers do this weekly or biweekly. A thorough search term review on an account with 100+ keywords across multiple campaigns takes 30 to 60 minutes per session.
Ad copy and creative: 1 to 2 hours per month. This includes writing new ad variations, pausing underperformers, and reviewing responsive search ad asset performance. Some freelancers handle this as part of the retainer; others charge separately for creative work. The amount of copy testing varies enormously: some freelancers are disciplined about running structured A/B tests, while others write a few ads at launch and barely touch them.
Reporting and client communication: 3 to 4 hours per month. This is the part most clients do not think about but freelancers absolutely do. Preparing monthly performance reports, writing update emails, hopping on calls to discuss strategy or answer questions, and responding to ad hoc requests. For many freelancers, client communication is the single largest time sink. A 30-minute weekly call plus report prep and email exchanges easily consumes 3 to 4 hours per month.
Strategic thinking and research: 1 to 2 hours per month. Competitor analysis, keyword research for expansion, landing page review, staying current on Google Ads changes, and thinking about broader campaign strategy. This is the highest-value work a freelancer does, and it is usually the first thing that gets squeezed when they are juggling too many clients.
Add it all up and you get 11 to 18 hours per month of total work. Subtract the reporting and communication time and you are left with roughly 7 to 12 hours per month of actual hands-on campaign optimization. That translates to roughly 2 to 3 hours per week of someone actively making your Google Ads better.
Is that enough? For a simple account with one or two campaigns and a modest budget, it can work. But for anything more complex, 2 to 3 hours of weekly attention leaves enormous gaps. Your account sits unmonitored for 165 of the 168 hours in a week. Competitive changes, seasonal shifts, and performance anomalies go unnoticed until the next review session. Optimization opportunities expire before anyone acts on them.
Here is the math that explains why most freelancers provide mediocre results, even when they are genuinely skilled.
A mid-level freelancer charging $1,500 per month per client needs 8 to 12 clients to earn $12,000 to $18,000 per month, which works out to $144,000 to $216,000 annually before taxes and business expenses. After self-employment taxes, health insurance, software subscriptions, and business overhead, take-home pay is more like $90,000 to $140,000. That is a comfortable living, but it requires maintaining a full roster of clients at all times.
At 15 hours per client per month and 10 clients, the freelancer is working 150 hours per month just on client accounts. Add in business development, invoicing, continuing education, and admin work, and they are working 180 to 200 hours per month. That is 45 to 50 hours per week. Sustainable, but with no margin for error.
Now think about what happens when real life intervenes. Client number 11 comes along with an attractive contract, and the freelancer says yes because turning down revenue feels risky. Their per-client time drops from 15 hours to 13. Then client number 12 signs on. Now it is 11 hours each. The freelancer starts triaging: bigger accounts get more attention, smaller accounts get less. Your $1,500 monthly retainer now buys 8 to 10 hours instead of 15, and the freelancer is not going to tell you that.
Research on task switching shows that knowledge workers lose an average of 23 minutes of productive focus every time they switch contexts. A freelancer switching between 10 to 12 different Google Ads accounts throughout the day, each with different industries, different strategies, and different client personalities, loses significant cognitive efficiency. They cannot hold the nuances of your account in their head the way a dedicated in-house manager could, because your account is one of a dozen competing for mental bandwidth.
This is not a character flaw. It is a structural problem with the freelancer model. The economics push freelancers toward taking on more clients than they can optimally serve, and the self-reporting nature of the work means there is no external check on whether your account is getting adequate attention.
The highest-quality freelancers cap their client load. A senior PPC specialist managing 4 to 6 accounts at $3,000 to $5,000 each can earn a strong income while delivering genuine attention. But at those rates, you are paying agency prices without the agency's infrastructure, backup systems, or accountability.
Hiring a freelancer introduces a set of risks that agencies and software platforms do not carry. These risks are not hypothetical. They are common enough that most business owners who have worked with freelancers have experienced at least one.
The disappearing freelancer. This is the most feared scenario and it happens more often than the industry admits. Your freelancer gets a full-time job offer, decides to pivot careers, burns out, or simply stops responding to messages. You are left scrambling to find someone who can take over your campaigns, understand your account history, and get up to speed quickly. The transition period, which can take weeks or months, results in campaigns running on autopilot with no optimization, and performance degrades accordingly.
A 2025 survey of small business owners found that roughly 30% had experienced a freelancer becoming unreachable or abruptly ending an engagement without adequate transition support. The number was even higher (around 40%) for freelancers found through marketplace platforms like Upwork or Fiverr.
The single point of failure. When your freelancer gets sick, takes vacation, has a family emergency, or simply has a bad week, there is no backup. Agencies have teams; if one person is out, another covers. A freelancer has nobody. Your campaigns still run during their absence, but nobody is monitoring performance, catching problems, or seizing opportunities. A week of unmonitored Google Ads can be expensive, especially if you are in a competitive market where bid landscapes shift daily.
Most freelancers will tell you they have a colleague who can cover in emergencies. In reality, that colleague has their own full client roster and can provide at best a cursory check-in, not the detailed management your account needs.
The rate creep. Freelancers start affordable and get expensive. A common pattern: you hire someone at $1,200 per month, they do solid work for six months, then announce a rate increase to $1,800. A year later, they are at $2,400. They have you locked in through institutional knowledge. They know your account, your business, your quirks. Switching to someone new means a ramp-up period and potential performance dips, so you absorb the increase.
Over three years, what started as a $1,200 per month engagement can easily reach $2,500 or more, and the quality of attention may actually decrease as the freelancer's overall business grows and their time gets spread thinner.
The knowledge gap. The Google Ads platform changes constantly. In just the first five weeks of 2026, Google released API v23 with channel-level Performance Max reporting, expanded campaign total budgets to Search and Shopping, began deprecating call-only ads, launched Direct Offers in AI Mode, and continued rolling out AI Max for Search. A freelancer needs to understand each of these changes, evaluate their impact, and adapt their management approach accordingly.
The best freelancers invest significant time in continuing education. But many do not. They learn a set of best practices early in their career and apply the same playbook year after year. If your freelancer is still managing campaigns the way they did in 2023, they are missing the most significant platform evolution in Google Ads history. And you have no easy way to assess whether their approach is current or outdated.
Account ownership and documentation. When a freelancer relationship ends, what do you keep? In the best case, your campaigns live in your own Google Ads account and the freelancer simply removes their access. But what about the strategy? The keyword research? The testing history? The reasoning behind campaign structure decisions? Most freelancers do not document their work comprehensively, because documentation takes time and clients do not pay for it. When they leave, their institutional knowledge walks out the door with them.
This is where the comparison stops being about price and starts being about physics.
A good freelancer working 12 productive hours per month on your account makes roughly 40 to 80 meaningful optimization decisions. These include bid adjustments on maybe 20 to 30 keywords, 10 to 15 negative keyword additions, a few budget shifts between campaigns, and perhaps 2 to 3 new ad variations. Each decision is informed by whatever data the freelancer happened to review during their 2 to 3 weekly sessions.
An autonomous AI agent operating on the same account makes thousands of optimization decisions per day. Not per month. Per day. It reviews every search term in real time and adds negatives within minutes instead of waiting for the weekly search term review. It adjusts bids on every keyword based on rolling performance data, not a snapshot from Tuesday morning. It tests ad copy continuously, retiring underperformers and scaling winners without waiting for a human to log in and approve changes. It reallocates budget across campaigns based on real-time conversion data, shifting spend toward what is working right now rather than what the freelancer noticed was working three days ago.
The math is not subtle. In a 30-day month, a freelancer makes roughly 60 optimization decisions during 12 hours of work. An autonomous AI agent makes roughly 2,000 to 5,000 decisions per day, or 60,000 to 150,000 per month. Even accounting for the fact that many of those decisions are micro-adjustments rather than major strategic moves, the volume difference means the AI catches opportunities and stops waste at a speed no human can match.
But it is not just about volume. It is about timing. Google Ads is a real-time auction. When a competitor pauses a campaign at 2 AM, the bid landscape shifts. When a trending topic drives search volume on a keyword you target, there is a window of opportunity that may last hours, not days. When a landing page starts converting poorly because of a website change, the cost-per-acquisition spike happens immediately.
Your freelancer is asleep at 2 AM. They check your account on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The competitor paused their campaign on Monday night and restarted it Wednesday morning. The trending topic spiked on Saturday and faded by Sunday. The landing page issue burned through $400 in wasted spend before anyone noticed on the next check-in.
An autonomous system operating 24/7 catches all three of these events in real time and responds within minutes.
To make this concrete, here is what a typical business spending $10,000 per month on Google Ads gets from a competent mid-level freelancer at $1,500 per month compared to what groas delivers.
Optimization frequency. The freelancer checks your account 2 to 3 times per week and makes adjustments during those sessions. groas monitors and optimizes continuously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Decisions are made in real time based on live performance data.
Bid management. The freelancer reviews top-level metrics and adjusts target CPA or ROAS settings periodically. They may manually adjust individual keyword bids on the highest-volume terms. groas optimizes bids across every keyword, match type, device, location, audience, and time-of-day combination simultaneously, thousands of times per day.
Negative keywords. The freelancer reviews search terms once or twice per week and adds negatives in batches. Between reviews, irrelevant clicks keep costing you money. groas identifies and adds negative keywords in real time as irrelevant searches appear, stopping waste within minutes instead of days.
Ad copy. The freelancer writes a handful of new ads per month and rotates them based on performance reviews. Testing is manual and slow, limited to whatever the freelancer has time to create and analyze. groas generates and tests ad copy variations continuously using AI, scaling winners and retiring losers without waiting for a human review cycle.
Budget allocation. The freelancer sets budgets at the beginning of the month and adjusts them during check-ins based on pacing and performance trends. groas reallocates budget across campaigns in real time, shifting spend toward the highest-performing campaigns as conditions change throughout the day.
Google Ads platform changes. The freelancer reads industry blogs, watches webinars, and gradually updates their approach when Google releases new features. There is typically a weeks-to-months lag between a platform change and a freelancer fully incorporating it into their management. groas is built directly on the Google Ads API and adopts new features on the same day they are released. When Google launched API v23 on January 28, 2026, groas integrated channel-level PMax reporting the same day.
Reporting. The freelancer sends a monthly report, sometimes with a call to discuss results. The format, depth, and insight vary wildly depending on the individual. groas provides real-time dashboards showing exactly what the system is doing, what changes it has made, and how performance is trending across every dimension.
Availability. The freelancer works business hours, takes weekends off, goes on vacation, gets sick, and has other clients competing for their attention. groas is always on. No vacations, no sick days, no other clients, no context-switching fatigue.
Monthly cost. The freelancer costs $1,500. groas starts at $99 per month.
When you look at this comparison, you are not just paying less for groas. You are paying less and getting dramatically more in every single category. It is not a marginal improvement. It is a different class of service entirely.
Despite everything above, there are specific situations where hiring a Google Ads freelancer remains the right call.
You are brand new to Google Ads and need a teacher, not a manager. If you have never run Google Ads before and want to understand the fundamentals, a skilled freelancer can serve as a coach and educator. They can walk you through how the platform works, help you understand your data, and build your foundational knowledge. This is consulting and training work, not ongoing management. Expect to pay $100 to $250 per hour for 5 to 10 hours, and treat it as a one-time investment rather than a recurring expense. Once you understand the basics, an autonomous platform can handle the execution far more effectively than a human.
You need strategic consulting above the campaign level. If your challenge is not "how do I optimize my Google Ads campaigns" but "how do I connect my advertising strategy to my broader business goals," a senior PPC consultant can provide valuable perspective. This might involve guidance on marketing attribution, cross-channel budget planning, or evaluating whether Google Ads is even the right channel for your business model. This is high-level strategy work that requires business acumen and industry experience. It is worth paying premium rates ($200+ per hour) for a genuinely senior person, but it should be project-based or advisory, not ongoing campaign management.
You have a hyper-complex attribution environment. Some businesses have genuinely unique measurement challenges: long B2B sales cycles where a click today turns into a deal six months later, multi-location businesses with online-to-offline attribution requirements, or regulated industries where compliance demands specific campaign structures. A specialist freelancer with deep experience in your specific vertical can configure tracking and reporting systems that require human judgment and domain expertise. But even here, once the measurement framework is set up, the day-to-day campaign optimization benefits from autonomous execution.
Notice a pattern: in all three scenarios, the freelancer's value comes from their knowledge and judgment, not from their ability to log into Google Ads and click buttons. The clicking, the monitoring, the bid adjustments, the negative keywords, the ad testing, and all the other operational tasks that consume the majority of a freelancer's time are precisely the tasks that autonomous AI does better, faster, and cheaper.
The smartest way to use a freelancer in 2026 is to hire one for their brain, not their hands. Pay them for 5 to 10 hours of strategic consulting, then let an autonomous platform handle the ongoing execution. You get the best of both worlds: human expertise where it matters most, and tireless AI optimization for everything else.
Most advertisers evaluate freelancer costs on a monthly basis. That is a mistake. The real cost only becomes clear over a longer time horizon.
Over 12 months, a freelancer at $1,500 per month costs $18,000. Add in the initial setup or audit fee ($500 to $1,500), any creative production they bill separately ($200 to $500 per month), and your own time managing the relationship (2 to 4 hours per month at $75 per hour), and the all-in cost is closer to $24,000 to $30,000 for the year.
Now factor in the performance differential. If an autonomous system delivers 40% better ROAS than a freelancer-managed account (a conservative estimate based on the structural advantages discussed above), and you are spending $10,000 per month on ads, that 40% improvement represents an additional $4,000 per month in revenue at a 4x ROAS baseline. Over 12 months, that is $48,000 in additional revenue you left on the table by choosing the freelancer.
Add the management cost savings. groas at $99 to $499 per month (depending on your plan) costs $1,188 to $5,988 per year. Even at the top end, you save $18,000 to $24,000 per year in management fees compared to the freelancer.
The total economic difference in year one: $18,000 to $24,000 in fee savings plus up to $48,000 in improved performance. That is $66,000 to $72,000 in total value, on an account spending just $10,000 per month.
At $20,000 per month in ad spend, the numbers roughly double. At $50,000 per month, they become dramatic enough that the decision is effectively already made.
The other time-related cost most people miss is the compounding effect of continuous optimization. A freelancer making 60 decisions per month learns from the results of those decisions over weeks and months. An autonomous system making 60,000 to 150,000 decisions per month learns at 1,000 times the rate. After six months, the system has explored more optimization paths than a freelancer could test in a decade. The performance gap does not stay constant. It widens over time.
Transitioning from a freelancer to an autonomous platform is simpler than most people assume, because the transition does not require you to discard anything.
Your campaigns stay exactly where they are. Everything lives in your Google Ads account. The freelancer was accessing it through their login; groas accesses it through the API. Your campaign structure, historical data, conversion tracking, and audience lists all remain intact.
You do not need to fire your freelancer immediately. The lowest-risk approach is to connect groas while your freelancer is still managing the account. Let both operate for 30 to 60 days. Compare the results side by side. The data will make the decision for you.
Keep the freelancer for strategic consultation if their advice is valuable. If your freelancer is genuinely excellent at strategic thinking, keep them on a reduced retainer (2 to 3 hours per month) for high-level advice while groas handles execution. You are paying for their brain, not their button-clicking, and you are getting better execution from the AI at a fraction of the cost.
Set clear benchmarks before you switch. Document your current performance metrics: CPA, ROAS, conversion rate, cost per click, impression share, and any other KPIs that matter to your business. After 60 days with groas, compare directly. This eliminates any ambiguity about whether the switch was the right call.
For a competent, mid-level freelancer in the US or Western Europe, expect to pay $1,000 to $2,500 per month on a retainer basis. Junior freelancers charge $500 to $1,000 but typically manage too many accounts to provide adequate attention. Senior specialists charge $2,500 to $5,000 but at that point you are paying agency-level rates without agency infrastructure. On an hourly basis, the range is $50 to $200 per hour, with most competent generalists falling between $75 and $125. Offshore freelancers cost less ($15 to $50 per hour) but often have communication barriers, timezone challenges, and less familiarity with markets outside their region.
Most full-time PPC freelancers manage 8 to 15 clients simultaneously. Some manage more: junior freelancers working at lower rates may have 15 to 25 accounts to make ends meet. Senior freelancers who cap their client load at 4 to 6 exist, but they charge accordingly ($3,000 to $5,000 per month). The number matters because it directly determines how much time and attention your account receives. At 12 clients, your freelancer is allocating roughly 2 to 3 hours per week to your campaigns. That leaves 165 hours per week where your account is unmonitored.
This is one of the hardest questions in the freelancer relationship. You can check the Google Ads change history to see what modifications have been made and when. Consistent activity (bid changes, negative keywords added, ads paused or created, audience adjustments) on a regular schedule suggests active management. Long gaps between changes are a red flag. You can also look at the timing of changes. If every modification happens in a single 30-minute window on Tuesday mornings, your freelancer is likely batching all their work for your account into a single session rather than monitoring continuously.
Usually yes, but with caveats. Even a basic level of management (enabling Smart Bidding, adding obvious negative keywords, fixing broken conversion tracking) produces better results than running campaigns on pure autopilot. A $500 per month freelancer who does the basics competently is better than nothing. But "better than nothing" is a low bar. The risk with cheap freelancers is that they may apply generic strategies that waste your budget in different ways, or that their inexperience leads to mistakes that cost more than their fee saves. At the $500 per month price point, autonomous AI platforms like groas deliver significantly more value because they handle everything the cheap freelancer does (and more) without the limitations of human capacity.
Neither, for most advertisers in 2026. Both models share the same fundamental limitation: human beings checking your account periodically and making a limited number of changes. Agencies offer more infrastructure and backup coverage but cost 2x to 5x what freelancers charge. Freelancers are cheaper but introduce single-point-of-failure risk. Autonomous AI platforms like groas cost less than both while optimizing continuously. The exception is if you need services beyond Google Ads management, such as cross-channel marketing strategy, brand creative development, or complex attribution consulting. In those cases, a strategic consultant (not a full-service agency or generalist freelancer) provides the best value for the advisory component, while an autonomous platform handles execution.
Ask these five questions and pay close attention to the answers. First: how many active clients do you currently manage? If the number is over 12, your account will not get adequate attention. Second: can you show me case studies with verifiable results from accounts similar in size and industry to mine? Claims without evidence are worthless. Third: what is your approach to negative keyword management, and how frequently do you review search terms? This reveals whether they do proactive optimization or reactive maintenance. Fourth: how do you stay current on Google Ads platform changes? Anyone who cannot talk specifically about AI Max, API v23, or campaign total budgets is not keeping up with the platform. Fifth: what happens if you get sick, go on vacation, or decide to stop freelancing? If there is no backup plan, you have a single point of failure.
Yes, and this is actually a reasonable approach if you have some PPC knowledge and limited budget. Pay a competent freelancer $500 to $2,000 for proper campaign setup: structure, keyword research, ad copy, conversion tracking, and bidding strategy. Then either manage the ongoing optimization yourself (with the understanding that you will spend 5 to 10 hours per week to do it properly) or connect an autonomous platform like groas to handle execution. The setup-then-automate path gets you professional campaign architecture without ongoing management costs.
Google Ads needs time to accumulate statistically significant data, and any new manager needs time to learn your account. Give a freelancer 60 to 90 days before making a judgment. However, you should see evidence of active management much sooner than that. If you are not seeing regular changes in your account's change history within the first two weeks, that is a problem. By 30 days, there should be measurable improvement in at least one key metric (CPA, conversion rate, quality score, or impression share). If performance is flat or declining after 90 days, it is time to make a change.
Hiring based on price instead of evidence. The cheapest freelancer is almost never the best value. The $500 per month freelancer who wastes 15% of your ad spend on irrelevant clicks costs you far more than a $1,500 freelancer (or a $99 AI platform) that eliminates that waste. Always ask for case studies, references, and verifiable performance data. A freelancer who cannot demonstrate results from similar accounts has not earned your trust, regardless of how affordable they are.
