update Tuesday 18th: I have reached out to 15 candidates for appointments
update Saturday 15th: I will try to go through the rest of the 60 CVs I have today and tomorrow. If you want to apply, please do so until Sunday at the latest. If there is an interest for it, I'd be willing to share some of my decision making afterwards.
update Thursday 13th: Starting tomorrow, I will reach out to the first applicants, either to schedule Skype calls, or to schedule doing my tasks. Currently, I have about 45 CVs, and 5 open spots. A couple of people from close to our headquarters have responded, those, I will hand off to my colleague in TX.
since the question came up repeatedly: Once you know what you are doing, one iteration over an 'easy' campaign would take 5 to 20 minutes. At the beginning, people only work on easy campaigns. Later on, there will still be easy ones, but you would get trickier ones, where the customers have very specific wishes, or where we are actually looking for conversions (people signing up, or buying stuff, or requesting a quote), not just for clicks.
If you are under 18, we will not be able to contract you. If you are about to turn 18, feel free to apply
Who are we and what do we do?
Simplifi is a startup from Fort Worth, Texas. Our company timeline can be found here
We do online advertising. We do 'Real Time Bidding'. This means that our customers set up campaigns with targeting criteria of their choice and we bid for them on so-called ad exchanges, one banner ad at a time, up to 400 000 times per second. Imagine ebay, with 40 milliseconds between putting the auction online and the ad being sold and displayed.
We are looking for contractors to help us in our day to day campaign work.
Contractors, what does that mean exactly?
You need to be able to legally invoice us on a montly basis. In some countries this requires setting up a company, or it would at least be highly advisable for taxation purposes. You are responsible for your own health cover, there are no paid sick days or holidays. You work x amount of hours in a month, send an invoice of x times your hourly rate, and we pay that.
We currently have contractors from the States, from Germany, Slovakia, England, Australia, Czech Republic and Bulgaria, so if you are from those countries, we could probably give you some pointers what you have to do to set up shop.
We communicate via Skype and email and collaborate via google docs and google drive. We try to do regional meetups every couple of months.
Our starting hourly rate is 15 dollars, if you just meet our requirements. For more qualified people, 20 dollars is possible, and if you really impress us and - thanks to your existing online advertising knowledge - we don't have to train you, we'd offer 25. Once you show us how hard-working and efficient you are, the 15 dollars will go up rather quickly.
What are our minimal requirements?
- fluent English
- ability to quickly analyze data, quick judgment
- ability to handle multiple projects
- tech savy
- broad knowledge, open minded, detail oriented
- work unsupervised
What will you do?
absolute entry level:
- run reports, change parameters to make campaigns meet the campaign goals
- expand targeting to spend the budgets in full
- contribute to building a library of targeting information
'senior' level:
- manage clients independently
- access to production servers: logfile analysis, database queries, administrative tasks
- use of our homegrown reporting engine
- design tools to streamline work
possible avenues for personal growth:
- Gentoo Linux admin
- (P)SQL god
- expert for ad-issues (shockwave, macro-expansion, javascript, iframes)
- graphic design work
- contribute to open-source software we use and customize: nginx, redis, nagios
- write, use and deploy shell or ruby (or any other skripting language) skripts
- DNS wizard
How do I apply?
Send me an up to date CV and a quick introduction of yourself. matthias_at_simpli.fi
How does the interview process work?
We will schedule a Skype call to get to know you, these typically last 30-60 minutes, we will ask some questions about you and also some technical questions, as we had our share of fabricated skill sections in CVs. You get to ask us questions as well, of course. These interviews will not be done by HR, or some manager, but by the people who are already working on campaigns for years and make up our 'AdOperations' team. If we like what we hear, we will send you some actual pieces of work that should take again 30-60 minutes to analyze, based on how well you do on those tasks, we will make a decision.
Have you played Starcraft?
Yes, I have. We were having a LAN session in my parents' basement the week it came out and played it pretty much non-stop then. I have also played on Bnet and my crowning achievement was beating OgerRod and OgerTob in a 2on2 LT at a LAN. I have never played Starcraft II however. Currently, I am playing a bit of Dota2 and the Alpha of Grim Dawn.
Any questions you have, feel free to post in this thread, send me a PM, or email me at the email address mentioned above.
On June 11 2013 13:32 Starcraft 2 wrote:
It looks interesting, but can you expand on what the job actually entails?
Especially "run reports, change parameters to make campaigns meet the campaign goals" and "expand targeting to spend the budgets in full".
It looks interesting, but can you expand on what the job actually entails?
Especially "run reports, change parameters to make campaigns meet the campaign goals" and "expand targeting to spend the budgets in full".
We have a campaign that is advertising for a retirement home in Baxter, Minnesota. The daily budget is 10 dollars. Currently the campaign is set up to target people that have searched on a list of about 2300 related keywords within the last 7 days, and their IP addresses resolve to the following locations:
Minnesota > Baxter
Minnesota > Brainerd
Minnesota > Crosby
Minnesota > Merrifield
Minnesota > Nisswa
Minnesota > Pequot Lakes
Minnesota > Pillager
Ads are displayed up to 3 times in a 12 hour window to them, and we are blocking around 600 domains where we don't want to serve ads on for this campaign.
The client put a click-through-rate goal into our UI of .2, we are currently far from achieving that.
We have about 10 different types of reports available through our UI (hourly, adposition, by exchange, domain, keyword, etc.), and about 30 more through our special reporting engine. The 'factors' from the latter can even be combined (query for geo-information, combined with contextual, timestamp, grouped by browsertype), but that is usually not necessary.
Based on these reports, you edit the campaign to get the click-through-rate closer to that .2 goal. One example would be to remove the keyword 'obits', since it was spending a good portion of the budget without seeing any clicks, or noticing that no clicks are occurring between 3 and 6 am and not serving ads there during that time period.