[kongzi]

Does anyone here have experience freelancing or running their own business in which you primarily work with web analytics such as SEO, Google Analytics, Adwords, etc? I heard this might be good to get into for people like me with a math/stats background.

How are the opportunities for freelance/remote work compared to web development? Could I land freelance roles if I have a fair amount of experience with R and Python, but am just starting to learn about web analytics?

[the-dream]

If you have skills and knowledge in those areas, having a career would be a waste and missed opportunity in my opinion. Those skills could make you much more money and give you a much nicer lifestyle if you apply them to your own websites and projects as opposed to working for a fixed price for clients or a company.

[superschalk]

(10-17-2016 01:58 AM)kongzi Wrote:  

Does anyone here have experience freelancing or running their own business in which you primarily work with web analytics such as SEO, Google Analytics, Adwords, etc? I heard this might be good to get into for people like me with a math/stats background.

How are the opportunities for freelance/remote work compared to web development? Could I land freelance roles if I have a fair amount of experience with R and Python, but am just starting to learn about web analytics?

My business is mostly based around web analytics and PPC marketing but also needs a decent amount of time spend on coding.

I agree with the-dream that if you have the skills you should rather run your own websites than working as a freelancer.

If you are a completely newbie in online marketing you could find a job in an online marketing agency. Entry level salaries are shit but within 6 months you should get enough experience in analytics and PPC marketing to leave the agency and start your own sites.

If you want to do the freelancing route I recommend that you rather focus on ad operations than analytics and PPC. Ad operations is basically all about monetization of websites. People who are really good in that are in high demand. Setting up header bidding or DFP is not something which everyone can do and if you have some coding knowledge that's even better.

Just to give you an idea. I am working with an ad ops guy from the Philippines to increase my ad revenues and he charges me $50 an hour which is hell a lot of money in the Philippines. US ad ops freelancers usually start at about $100 per hour.

[RichieP]

I'd argue you're overqualified for typical marketing roles like that.

It does depend at what level you enter though. There are people doing some pretty sophisticated traffic analysis. But most people in these roles are not, and could not code Fizzbuzz or tell you about chi-squared if their life depended on it.

PCC/SEO/Analytics is less about sophisticated technical stuff, and more just about running experiments and consistently applying best practices, which you can glean from the best 3 books on each topic on amazon.

Data science type stuff is much meatier.

if you want to freelance/run your own agency though, PPC/SEO/Analytics is the easiest route. But bear in mind that the "key factors for success" there are not Python, R, etc... they are marketing, sales, managing contractors, dealing with clients... etc. The actual work you do won't be that technical.