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A company is going to hire me to call up all of their clients and sell them Adwords services (like setting up new campaigns and maintaining them). After the client agrees I'm also the one who is going to pursue the work. But the problem is that I only get paid when a client purchases these services. So all the time that I need to prepare the proposal for this client, the phonecall etc. is not going to bring me any money.

What should be a reasonable percentage on each "sale" that I should get when I take this "job"?

UPDATE (via answer below): I think you both misunderstood me. I'm getting paid for setting those campaigns up and maintaining them and get a commission for doing that. If a campaign is successful or not has nothing to do with it

Thank you for your input, Dennis

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4 Answers

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Administrating the buy of Google Adwords is effectively Media Buy. This is essentially what ad networks do, and they usually take about a 15% cut on the budget total media plan. Of course, varies a lot depending on the budget size, relationship with clients and what not.

The problem with getting payed only in success is that success in an ad campaign is subjective. I would encourage you to find some other business model for this work.

Disclosure: I'm the CTO of Burt, an display campaign analytics company.

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How much is a sale actually worth and what is the average time you will need to achieve it?

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Sorry to be rude, but does it matter how much a sale is worth. Does that change the idea of how much percentage I should receive? This company is hiring me because they don't have the time to manage all of this them self, and they don't want to hire someone in their company full time for this. The idea is that they could upsell this client to other services.

But anyway, the only thing I want to know is what you guys think what would be a fair percentage deal.

Dennis

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it matters because the numbers could be small. If you have to call 100 customers and only 10% want a proposal you have to spend several hours writing/sending/following-up each proposal. Then only 1 decides to buy a $10 a month campaign, how much per hour will you get even with 50% of the sale? And the customer cancels it next month because the campaign failed. You need to clarify if they are paying you a base plus the commission or just commission only. Commission only jobs are usually no-risk for the company. And be aware the 'customer' list may just be a list of numbers from the phone book. – james Dec 9 '10 at 1:36
up vote 0 down vote

While John Sjölander's statement about media buying is partially correct -- typical buyer fees ("discounts" as they're often called) are in the 15-20% range -- Google AdWords and other SEM is in a different ballpark. The reason is because it's so very complicated to administer, monitor, and support.

We've seen rates in the 50% range for full service, and feel it's well worth it. There's a huge learning curve to SEM, and figuring out the ins-and-outs of keyword testing, etc., is a huge value-add.

That 50% fee covers everything from finding the leads to running the program. If this company is sending you warm leads, that's certainly worth a % of the total fee (10% maybe?).

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