Is it true that freelancers outperform agencies when it comes to managing Google Ads accounts for e-commerce stores? Expert entrepreneur M 30 shares his experience of achieving a 20x ROAS with a freelancer compared to multiple failed attempts with marketing agencies. Discover why prioritizing expertise over portfolio size can lead to greater success for your online business. #FreelancersVsAgencies #GoogleAds #EcommerceSuccess
Most freelancers and agencies are equally bad. That you had no idea how to vet them and (seem to have) stumbled upon a good one by luck isn’t as useful a lesson as it may seem.
I agree with you.
Freelancer work for themselves. If they fail to do some job they will not get paid and that directly affects their life.
People that work in agencies basically do not care about the end result. If one project does not succeed them are moved to the next.Â
As a freelancer myself – there are plenty of lazy, incompetent, inexperienced or just plain awful freelancers out there. You got a good one, which is great! But without careful vetting it’s not different than any agency or other company – you either get “lucky” or not. The real lesson here is to carefully vet your vendors and find a good fit.
nah. the moral of the story is that if you have a large media buy, don’t work with an agency that has never managed a budget of >$10K a month
For the last few years I have worked as freelance CTO for various e-commerce businesses. Every single time my job starts with me joining in as a contractor because agency project goes bad and then staying for next year or two and building a team.
My stats are as follows:
6 Dev agencies hired before me starting or when we needed more resources. 0 times delivered in reasonable timeframe or budget, but some items delivered.
3 marketing agencies. 0 times delivered and pretty much every single time being lied to and gaslighted. Seriously the worst experience.
12 freelancers. 1 designer ( great ), 8 programmers ( 1 great, 1 ok, 3 not ok, 3 frauds ), 2 devops ( 1 great, 1 ok ), 1 email marketing ( ok ). This is only actually hired ones, not interviewed.
When it comes to agencies I couldn’t believe that they are all that crap. I worked for agencies in the past of different profiles and we did great job.
The agencies I hired now though are insane. They don’t provide fixed quotes. They charge more than I charge per day and provide me with junior dev in that price ( even if they are from eastern Europe or India! ). They charge for the project manager even higher fees for some insane reason and the project manager does literally nothing.
The thing is. I myself know at least a bit about any of those skills. Over the years I started as SEO, worked on tons of designs and I am myself dev. Even I cannot catch always bad actors ( I can check the skill, but not performance ). For business owner who doesn’t know anything about those things it’s way lower risk to hire agency than to hire freelancer. They gonna deliver over the budget, terrible product but at least they gonna deliver it or you can sue them.
The only thing I can recommend with agencies is to:
1. If possible agree only on performance based pay. It will mean paying extra in case it works, but it generally pays off for you as it’s direct income in e-commerce.
2. If not possible to pay on performance basis agree only on a fixed quote. That means a lot of planning before signing a contract which sometimes you have to pay for ( I do that with my clients, usually a few days )
3. If both are not possible ( like in large commerce development projects ) you need to have a 3rd party that knows what they are doing. That’s what I am generally doing and it saves clients loads of money. You don’t need to have them all the time, but someone checking what’s up every few weeks/months will pay off ten fold.
A couple generalists along with a few very talented freelancers is the way.
I’ve been saying this for a while, however, the real difference is the budget. Cheap clients + cheap freelancers = bad results. Find a quality freelancer, pay the real budget, get good results.