Disclosure: this list was put together by the team at Excella PPC. One of the ten, Yulian H., is the agency’s founder. He cleared the same filters on the same public Upwork data as everyone else here, and the list is unordered, so his inclusion carries no ranking weight. We are flagging it so you can weigh it for yourself.
Finding a good Google Ads expert is harder than it should be. The job has almost no barrier to entry, anyone can put “Google Ads specialist” on a profile after running two campaigns for their cousin’s shop, and the people shouting loudest on LinkedIn are rarely the ones quietly spending six figures a month for serious clients. So when you go looking for a Google Ads consultant, you’re mostly staring at confident bios with very little you can actually check.
That’s the problem this list is trying to fix. Instead of opinion, we went to Upwork, because it’s the one place where a freelancer’s track record is out in the open: how much they’ve earned, how many clients came back, and what those clients wrote once the work was done. You can’t fake a Job Success Score the way you can fake a testimonial on your own website.
Below are ten Google Ads experts who hold up when you look at the numbers, not just the pitch. They don’t all do the same thing. Some live in e-commerce and Shopping, others in lead-gen for B2B, so this isn’t a one-to-ten ranking. It’s ten strong people with different strengths, and a note on who each one is right for.
In this guide
- What is a Google Ads expert?
- Where to find a Google Ads expert
- How we picked these ten Google Ads experts
- The 10 top-rated Google Ads experts
- What to ask before you hire
- FAQ
What is a Google Ads expert?
Almost anyone can call themselves one, so the title means nothing on its own. By any honest definition, a Google Ads expert is someone who has managed real budgets across enough accounts and enough years to have seen things break, and who can connect the money going in to the profit coming out. A few things make that real, and you can check all of them.
The first is exposure. Running two campaigns for a friend’s shop teaches you one account in one situation. Managing dozens across different verticals for years teaches you what a broken Shopping feed, a starved bidding algorithm, or a Performance Max campaign quietly eating your branded traffic actually look like. Expertise is mostly pattern recognition, and the patterns only come from volume and time.
The second is measurement. The account is only as good as the data feeding it, so a real expert knows whether conversions are tracked correctly, which ones should train the bidding, and which should be excluded. Get this wrong and every decision after it is built on a number that isn’t real. This is where most self-described experts quietly fall apart.
The third is automation. Modern Google Ads is run by algorithms you steer rather than operate by hand. The expert knows what signals Smart Bidding and PMax use, how to give them clean data to learn from, and when to leave them alone instead of resetting everything each week.
The fourth is unit economics. They think in margin, lifetime value, and payback, not ROAS floating in a vacuum. They can tell you what a customer is worth and build the budget backwards from there.
What doesn’t count: the Google Ads certificate, which is a free quiz, the Partner badge, which mostly reflects spend and certs, or years on a LinkedIn profile. A track record you can verify is the only real proof, which is why this list is built on real client data.
Where to find a Google Ads expert
There are plenty of places to look, and they are not equally useful. The whole difference between them comes down to one thing: how much of what you see can you actually verify.
The worst place to start is social media. LinkedIn, X, TikTok and the rest reward the people who post the most, not the people who get the best results, and those are rarely the same person. A confident thread about scaling an account to seven figures costs nothing to write and proves nothing. You are looking at a personal brand, not a track record, and the two are easy to mistake for each other until the invoices start coming in.
Referrals are a step up, because someone you trust has actually worked with the person. The limit is sample size. One good result, in one account, in one industry tells you that person can do that, not that they can do yours, and your network only knows the handful of people it happens to know.
Then there are agency directories and “top expert” lists. Treat these carefully, because a lot of them are pay to play. A spot near the top often reflects who paid for placement or who published the list, not who delivers. The Google Partner badge has the same weakness: it mostly reflects spend and certifications, not whether the person is any good for your account.
The best place to look is an independent platform where the track record is out in the open and hard to fake. You want to see how much someone has actually earned, how many clients came back for more, and what those clients wrote once the work was paid for and finished. That kind of history can’t be invented the way a testimonial on a personal website can. The clearest example, and the number one place to find Google Ads talent this way, is Upwork, which is exactly where we went to build this list.
One last thing. Whoever you choose, we’d recommend hiring and keeping the work on Upwork.
How we picked these ten Google Ads Experts
We didn’t rank these ten by opinion, by reputation, or by who has the slickest website. We started with about 200 of the highest-rated Google Ads freelancers on Upwork and ran every one of them through the same set of filters, all based on data the platform makes public and a client can’t fake. Ten cleared all of them. Fail a single filter and you were out, no matter how good you looked everywhere else.
Here is what a freelancer had to clear to make the list:
Above-average rates. The best people are rarely the cheapest, and clients putting serious money into ads do not keep paying someone who loses it for them.
They did the work behind their own reviews. That ruled out owners of large agencies, and anyone who operates as an agency while delegating the actual work.
Google Ads is their main focus, not one item on a long menu. We wanted specialists, not generalists who also happen to dabble in paid search.
Top Rated Plus status. This is Upwork’s highest freelancer tier, reserved for people with a sustained record on larger, longer contracts. It already bundles most of what follows, so we treated it as the floor, not the finish line.
A 100% Job Success Score. Not 98, not 99. This is Upwork’s running measure of whether clients walk away satisfied, and keeping it perfect across years of work is genuinely hard.
At least $300,000 earned on the platform. Enough volume to prove this is a real track record, not a handful of lucky contracts.
At least one long-term client relationship worth $40,000 or more. Anyone can land a project. Keeping a client paying for years is the harder signal, and the one that says the work actually performs.
Reviews almost entirely five stars, with nothing below four. A soft review or two across hundreds of jobs is normal. A pattern of low scores is not, and it took people off the list.
None of this measures personality, follower count, or how well someone describes themselves. It measures what happened after clients paid them, which is the only thing that tells you whether the next client will be glad they did.
Two things this list is not. First, it is not a ranking. There is no best and no worst here, and the order means nothing. Everyone below cleared the same high bar, and they work in different places, e-commerce and Shopping for some, lead-gen for others, so lining them up one against another would not even make sense. Pick by fit, not by position.
Second, it is not the complete list of good Google Ads specialists on Upwork. These filters were strict on purpose, and a strict filter always leaves out names that probably belong. There are excellent Google Ads experts on the platform who are not on this list, some who missed a single cutoff, some we simply did not come across. This is ten people we can stand behind, not a claim that nobody else is worth hiring.
The 10 top-rated Google Ads experts
1. Yulian H.
Yulian Hrab
Best Google Ads expert for: High-budget eCommerce, SaaS, AI products and local businesses
Yulian has spent ten years in Google Ads, most of it on large-budget accounts where one wrong bidding call shows up as real money lost.
He works as Google Ads specialist mostly across e-commerce, SaaS, AI products, and local businesses. The record holds up: $400K+ earned, a 100% score across 69 reviews, and three separate long-term contracts worth $40,000 or more, the clearest sign that clients stay because the work performs.
Best if you already have product volume and real budget behind you, less of a fit for a brand-new store still hunting its first winners.
2. Ben O.
Ben O.
Best for: Goolge Ads & Linkedin Ads Lead Gen
Ben has spent over ten years on lead generation rather than e-commerce: Search campaigns built around cost per qualified lead for service and B2B businesses, where the goal is a steady flow of real inquiries, not cheap clicks. The record is consistent, $400K+ earned and a 100% score across 154 reviews.
Best for service and B2B businesses chasing qualified leads
3. Aaron P
Aaron P.
Best for: German market and ecommerce projects
Aaron’s specialty is the DACH market: Google Ads for German-speaking Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. That is a genuine niche, because the keywords, the competition, and the buyer language all differ from the English-speaking world, and few freelancers cover it properly. The Upwork record: $400K+ earned and a 100% score across 145 reviews, at an $80 hourly rate.
Best for businesses selling into German-speaking markets, of little use if your customers sit elsewhere.
4. Andrei H.
Andrei H.
Best for: Driving qualified B2B leads through Google Ads
Andrei is the second lead-gen specialist on this list, and the difference is range: his work spans small budgets up to large ones rather than sitting in one tier. The numbers: $300K+ earned and a 100% score across 76 reviews, at an accessible $60 an hour.
That combination makes him a sensible option as Google Ads expert for smaller and mid-sized advertisers who want lead generation handled without paying a top rate.
5. Ilya B.
Ilya B.
Best for: Google Ads & Meta Ads projects and expert consultations
Ilya works across both Google Ads and Meta Ads, and also takes paid consultations, not just full management. His numbers are substantial: $1m+ earned and a 100% score across 711 reviews, at $99 an hour, with that review count pointing to a high volume of separate engagements, including shorter consults.
Best if you want one handling both search and social, or an expert opinion without committing to a full retainer.
6. Lisa J.
Lisa J.
Best for: DTC & Lead Gen
Lisa has worked as a freelance Google Ads expert on Upwork since 2012, one of the longest tenures on the platform. She covers both DTC e-commerce and lead generation, manages every account herself with no outsourcing, and charges a premium $195 an hour, the rate of someone whose clients treat the results as worth it. The record: $900k+ earned and a 100% score across 152 reviews.
Best for established DTC and lead-gen businesses with real budget, not for a small or first-time account.
7. Matjaz B.
Matjaz B.
Best for: Ecommerce, DTC & SaaS
Matjaz works on the part most freelancers skip: measurement. His focus is server-side tracking and clean conversion data, the layer that decides whether Google’s bidding optimizes toward real results or noise. He runs Google and Meta for e-commerce, DTC, and SaaS. The record: $700k+ earned and a 100% score across 128 reviews, at $85 an hour.
Best if your tracking is broken or your conversion data went unreliable after the privacy changes, less essential if your measurement is already clean and you just need campaigns run.
8. Sahba N.
Sahba N.
Best for: Building Google Ads campaigns in Spanish and Arabic
Sahba’s niche is language: he builds and runs Google Ads campaigns in Spanish and Arabic, markets most freelancers can’t serve, alongside English. The background is unusual too, six years inside Google as an AdWords strategist before going independent. The data backs it: $600k+ earned and a 100% score across 209 reviews, at $95 an hour.
Best if you advertise into Spanish or Arabic-speaking markets and want someone fluent in both the language and the platform, less relevant if your campaigns are English-only.
9. Jonathan S.
Jonathan S.
Best for: When campaigns no longer scaling
Jonathan is a Google Ads expert who works at the level of revenue and growth rather than single campaigns. He gets called in when accounts stop scaling, acquisition costs creep up, or ad performance stops lining up with the business. At $225 an hour he is priced like a fractional CMO, not a campaign manager. The data: $500k+ earned and a 100% score across 118 reviews.
Best for established companies that have plateaued and need a strategic fix, not for one that just needs campaigns set up and run.
10. Chukwudi A.
Chukwudi A.
Best for: Businesses of all sizes
Chukwudi runs paid media across more than one platform: Google Ads at the core, with Meta and LinkedIn alongside. What stands out is volume. His profile shows $1M+ earned and 12,461 logged hours across 156 jobs, all at a 100% score, which is years of full-time work.
Best if you want one person covering Google, Meta, and LinkedIn together rather than three separate specialists, less ideal if you want someone who does nothing but Google Ads.
What to ask before you hire (even a top Google Ads expert)
A 100% score and a long earnings history are enough to land someone on a list like this. They don’t tell you whether this particular Google Ads specialist is right for your account. Four questions sort that out fast, and anyone worth hiring will answer all of them without flinching.
Will you do a paid audit first? Before any retainer, ask for a paid audit of your account. A free audit is usually a sales pitch dressed up as analysis. A paid one means the consultant actually digs in, and you walk away with a real list of problems whether or not you go on to hire them. It is also the cheapest way to see how a Google Ads consultant thinks before you commit to months of fees.
How much availability do you actually have? “Available now” on a profile is not the same as having room for your account. Ask how many clients they currently run and how much time yours would get each week. A Google Ads freelancer juggling fifteen accounts at a few hours each will not give yours real attention, no matter how good they are.
Who will actually be in the account? You are hiring a person, so confirm that person is the one doing the work. Some profiles that read like a solo operator quietly subcontract or pass parts to someone else. You want a straight answer that the name on the profile is the name managing your campaigns, not a junior or a tool left on autopilot.
How do you charge, and what does it cover? Fee structures carry different incentives. A percentage of ad spend rewards spending more, not spending well. Performance deals sound fair but live or die on how “performance” gets defined. A flat retainer is predictable, but you need to know what is included. A good Google PPC expert will spell out the model and exactly what you get for it, not dodge the question.
FAQ
How much does a Google Ads expert cost?
A skilled freelance Google Ads expert typically charges between $60 and $225 an hour on Upwork, with senior consultants at the top of that range. Many work on a flat monthly retainer instead. The rate tracks experience and account complexity, and cheaper is rarely better, because a weak setup wastes far more in ad spend than you save on the fee.
Freelancer vs agency: which is better?
Neither is better by default, it depends on what you need. A freelancer gives you direct access to the person actually doing the work, usually at a lower cost, which fits focused budgets and a single channel. An agency adds a team and multi-channel scale, but at a higher price and often with a junior on your account. For most small and mid-sized advertisers, a senior freelancer is the closer fit.
Should I hire a Google Ads expert or learn it myself?
If you are spending real money on ads, hiring is almost always the better call. Google Ads is easy to start and hard to do well, and the months you spend learning are paid for in wasted budget. Doing it yourself only makes sense on a very small spend, where the cost of mistakes is low. If you want to go that route, our blog covers Google Ads in more depth.
