If you’ve been in business for more than 30 days, you’ve probably heard of Upwork. Billed as a marketplace for professionals, Upwork is a service that connects people who need help with service providers.
Upwork for freelancers looking for work
Much digital ink has been written about whether Upwork is a good place for service providers. In my personal experience, I never was able to book a client through the platform, so I feel like you’re competing with service providers in developing countries who will offer a service for a fraction of the cost I can offer the same service for.
Using Upwork to hire freelancers
This can be great for the business owner on a tight budget; but can also be a slippery slope when you cannot account for quality and the platform offers very limited conflict-resolution tools for disputes that arise when your purchase is not all that it was supposed to be. For example, there are lots of complaints about subpar quality work, cultural differences that render the work product useless and sometimes plagiarized work that gets sold as original.
How a highly-specialized Upwork pro saved my bacon
As you know, I offer a wide range of digital marketing services (not just design) to my clients. One of those services is running Google Ads.
I had a new client who had never used Google Ads and was interested in me running a 30-day campaign for a course. We signed a contract, had a kickoff, did a level set on strategy and I setup their Google Ads account.
The campaign started running and on day 7, I received a notification that Google had suspended my clients ad account due to what they were calling “an egregious policy violation.” After doing some work on the back end, I was unable to find the “egregious policy violation” so I followed the steps to appeal the decision.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- It is almost impossible to have a conversation with a human in Google Ads.
- They will not give you any additional information of what constitutes an egregious violation aside from what is listed in their advertising policies.
- Sometimes the system flags things because the algorithm got confused, and those things can resolve themselves in a few days.
After my appeal was denied the first time, I started to really sweat bullets. Not only were we unable to get the ad campaign re-started, we were actively told that simply creating another ad account to continue to run ads would result in both my client and myself being banned from the Google Ads platform altogether.
I had a moment of brilliance and decided to do an Upwork search for someone who could help me. And BAM! In a few minutes I was able to identify three individuals who not only were advertising Google Ads account support for exactly the kind of violations Google was accusing us of, but had a great number (1000+) reviews of happy customers.
And this is where, in my opinion, Upwork shines. I was able to get in touch with one of these amazing individuals who in less than 3 business days helped me solve my problem, identify exactly the reason the account got flagged for suspension, exact steps to make sure the violation was no longer there, and get the account un suspended and delivering once again. All for $500.
So, the next time you have an obscure problem that requires professional attention from someone with way better technical skills than what you have, consider Upwork.
