Before I started freelancing full time I spent 8 years in full time employment in various marketing positions from a Marketing Executive to PPC Senior Executive. If you want to pursue PPC freelancing or wondering where and how to begin, I hope you learn a thing or two from my story.
How did I get into PPC?
First marketing role
I have been doing digital marketing since 2014 primarily running small ad accounts managing budgets of up to £3K/month primarily on Facebook and Google Ads as well as managing websites & content to help them rank better organically that was back in Moldova where I worked for a full service agency. Nothing remarkable, but it helped me get an idea of how marketing channels worked together.
Highlight: I helped a legal consultancy firm grow from a team of 5 to 30 in two years that I managed their site and ran their ads on Facebook & Google. Today (29/07/2025) they’re a team of over 130 people going strong.
Salary: £300 – £500/month
Moving to England
In 2017 I moved to the UK and applied for a Marketing Executive position in a recruitment company, not my dream role, but it matched well with my previous experience as I had done some good work for a recruitment agency in Moldova and was confident I could help + my english wasn’t great and I was lacking confidence to apply to anything more serious than that.
I got an offer for £20,000 that’s about £1,400/month after tax. I spent 9 months with the company managing a budget of £8K on Facebook, instant forms were working really well at the time.
Highlight: Right before I officially left the CEO offered a pay raise to £25,000, a company car and a £1,500 bonus regardless of whether I decided to stay or leave (most probably because I didn’t use my holiday allowance lol). I was too excited and wanted to learn, didn’t care much about time off. I left mid month in July and I did get the bonus, yey!
I met some great people during my 9 months, but there weren’t any senior marketing people to learn from and that was the main reason for the change. Learning and people took priority over money. Even now 7 years later that holds true. People first, money second.
Salary: £1,300/month
My First PPC Executive job
I had been looking for PPC jobs on job boards & LinkedIn and eventually came across a Digital Marketing Executive role with a focus on PPC on LinkedIn..
It was perfect, most importantly it was close to where I lived so I applied. It was advertised at £22,000 – £27,000 depending on experience and after the interview I got accepted for £25,000. That’s about £1,650/month.
I didn’t know much about ecommerce PPC at the time and I had no idea this is what I’ll pursue to do full time 5 years later, but I had been lucky to learn from a very intelligent senior called Rajen (if you’re reading this, thank you friend). I’ll forever be grateful for him taking a chance on me.
I shortly started managing £50K/month in ad spend on Google and £5K/month on Facebook. This was an account with history and it was performing really well. Most of the time I was experimenting with new campaigns for new brands/products & keeping the spend under control depending on stock.
It wasn’t an account that could be easily scaled because the margins were tight so it was more about finding the right balance between the marketing spend and profit.
Highlight: I was lucky to have a great manager that always had my back. When you’re just yourself managing all the channels for a small business it’s hard to master one thing well so the experience of working in a £100M/year business helped me spend more time on the channel that was responsible for 30% of the revenue that’s Google Ads and when you spend most of your time on one channel you inevitably master it. I still had a lot of learn, but I finally felt more confident.
Salary: £1,650 – £2,200
First Freelance Jobs
In 2020 I was still doing the 9 to 5 and it was getting repetitive, I had automated most things and the account was performing really well so I thought I’d try to do some work on the side. So I signed up to Upwork.
I set my hourly rate at $30 and started applying to jobs. The very first was a gig for which I was paid $14.40. It cost me more to buy Upwork connects and apply to a few different posts that never replied to my proposals, but I was in no rush and kept applying.
The job was boring, I simply delivered some feedback in a word doc with screenshots and thoughts. As long as you had access to an account it didn’t require much PPC knowledge.
Second job was a campaign setup for a builder in London. I set up a campaign, but he hardly had any budget for ads so management didn’t make any sense. It was a very simple build with exact match location keywords in one Search campaign with a few service specific ad groups.
Although he didn’t leave any feedback, he liked the work and hired me later for an audit & On-Page SEO work.
Then I realised I wasn’t getting much luck with applying to high paying jobs so I tried to build my reputation with low budget projects like this one.
This was a weird tutoring job. Someone was applying for a PPC role and they had some questions with the homework he’s been given. Far from what I hoped I would get from Upwork, but I got a good review.
And many more low budget jobs like this one.
Eventually my profile had collected enough positive reviews and I started getting more invites to jobs. That’s when you rank organically well and as soon as the clients post a job they can invite highlighted freelancers.
Worth mentioning that quite a few projects that started on Upwork ended up paying directly as I developed a good relationship with the client. Some of them after a quick intro call wanted to avoid Upwork altogether.
This for example was a job for an account setup which I did in 2020. Then in 2022 the client reached out directly and signed up for a monthly retainer at £500/month.
Over time as I have been getting more reviews and invites, I slowly raised my hourly rate and had more success with getting replies from clients with better Upwork history.
Some of the biggest jobs are still in progress while others are direct.
White label PPC work
While I was doing stuff on Upwork, I also was helping a colleague that had an account in management under his agency spending £300K/month that was the biggest account I’d ever managed and it was under a supervision of someone more senior than me so it was a great learning experience. He was paying me £300/month. It wasn’t client facing, I was just taking care of the changes, updates and reports as and when those were needed.
This is why it’s important to join a company where you could build connections like that which in my case really shaped my path.
As the time went on, I helped with a few more accounts and shared others I was getting from Upwork, but didn’t feel confident in my skillset to take them on. The owner of the agency was paying me a commission every month on the leads I referred so that was the easiest money I’d ever made. I wasn’t very good at sales, but people trusted me and my recommendations.
If the agency signed up a £1,500/month contract I’d get 10% of that for as long as the agency worked with the client. Sweet deal if you ask me.
I also had a few other experiences helping other agencies, but most of them were short lived, I was finding myself doing more client comms than actual work and you couldn’t say no to some of the accounts coming your way. And some of those were very difficult to manage.
My first £3K/month
While I was working full time on £2,200/month with all the side jobs I realised I’m earning more than what I’m paid for working full time, it was around 2022 so that’s when I decided to take a 3 month sabbatical and try the nomad lifestyle. Booked an Airbnb in Spain for a month and focused full time on growing my portfolio of PPC clients.
Long story short, I didn’t enjoy travelling. It was too hot and I couldn’t focus on work with uncomfortable working setups so after 3 months of some Italy & Portsmouth travel I headed home.
Although I didn’t make much progress with getting more clients, I felt it was the right time to make a change so I left my 9 to 5 job and did Upwork full time.
Soon I was getting referrals from existing clients and it quickly grew into £5K, but that’s where I got stuck for a while. I had some legacy clients that were very demanding paying £300/month and others that were doing really well and hardly ever spoke to them paying £1.5K/month.
I realised I had to let some of them go and sign up bigger fish 🙂
My first £3K contract
As I let lower paying clients go, I started asking for more money to manage ads. My first big contract started with £1.5K for Google and later another £1.5K for Facebook Ads management, in total £3K/month + VAT managing a lead gen account spending £30K/month on Google, £5K/month on Bing and £20K/month on Facebook.
It also came as a direct message on Upwork.
£10K/month
Shortly after that I signed up a few more deals also from Upwork and I broke just past £10K.
At this point I was managing everything myself managing about 10 accounts.
Then Upwork got a bit quiet, I wasn’t getting as many invitations to jobs as I used to and I started posting on LinkedIn. I hadn’t had much success because it was all new to me, but a few posts sparked some interest, one of them was about profit tracking, another was a case study. I did that for a few months and then I took a break.
A year later I started posting again, not as frequently, a simple post of a review a client left me and that lead to a prospect messaging me and signing up a £2K/month contract. That’s the only client I got from LinkedIn. The platform has more to offer and I plan to be more active, but all takes time.
What I’m up to now?
Today I’m still freelancing from my home office and have a few people who help me to make sure I deliver the best service I can and there’s someone to cover for me when I’m not feeling well.
My #1 priority is serving my clients the best PPC management service they can get.
And as for scaling the operation, working with less clients and having a commission fee structure in place is what I find works best for me. Allows me to spend the time needed to understand the business and help across channels while I take ownership of paid search. I build better relationships and become an integral part of a team.
Great teams can achieve great things together.
If you’d like to explore working together, email me at victor@victorserban.com I’d love to hear from you and if you’re on your own PPC freelance journey and want to connect, send me a message, we can be PPC friends :)
Thanks,
Victor