I am Mubin Shaikh, a digital marketing freelancer in Dubai. I run Google Ads, Meta Ads, SEO and lead generation for businesses across the city, and I hold a UAE trade licence (No. 1618922) and a Social Media Advertiser Permit (No. 475238) to do it legally. You hire me and you get me. No account manager in the middle, no junior doing the real work, no recycled template from last month's client. Six years of running live budgets, from a Dubai SME spending AED 5,000 a month to ecommerce brands well into six figures.
Plenty of people in Dubai sell digital marketing as freelancers with no licence. They cannot give you a tax invoice, they cannot sign a contract that holds, and if a paid campaign breaks a platform rule, the account risk sits on you. I am licensed and permitted, so none of that is your problem.
The numbers below are real and conservative. I would rather under-state them than get caught inflating, which is exactly the trap that sinks most freelancer sites.
I started in digital marketing in 2019 and spent the early years inside the work rather than in meetings about it. Running ads, fixing tracking, rebuilding accounts that were quietly losing money. The same lesson kept showing up: most businesses do not have a traffic problem. They have a targeting problem, a creative problem, or a funnel problem, and they are paying full price to discover it slowly.
I keep my client list short on purpose. Fewer accounts means I am genuinely across yours every week instead of skimming it between a dozen others. If that sounds limiting, it is. It is also the entire reason the work lands.
Anyone can type a licence number on a website. Here are the real documents, so you can check before you commit to anything.
Both documents are public record. If you would like them verified directly with the issuing authority before signing anything, just ask happy to walk you through it.
As a digital marketing freelancer in Dubai I take on the work below, either as a single channel or the whole stack. Most clients start with one and add more once the numbers move.
Google Ads management is paid search, shopping and video advertising on Google, run to produce leads and sales rather than clicks. I handle Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Display and YouTube. I rebuild account structure when it is broken, fix conversion tracking before touching anything else, and build campaigns around what people in Dubai are actually searching. As a freelance Google Ads expert in Dubai I work mostly with service businesses and ecommerce stores spending AED 10,000 to AED 200,000 a month.
Explore Google Ads and PPCMeta Ads is paid advertising across Facebook and Instagram, from first impression to purchase. Most accounts I audit are paying for reach they never convert. I build the full funnel: cold prospecting, retargeting for people who already showed interest, and conversion campaigns off real buyer data, with creative that earns the click. If you have been looking for a Facebook Ads freelancer in Dubai or an Instagram Ads freelancer in Dubai, this is where most of my week goes.
Explore Meta AdsSEO is the work of getting your site to rank in Google's organic results so you stop paying for every visitor. I run technical fixes, on-page optimisation, and content aimed at the queries your buyers actually type. I also build for AI search, so your business can be cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews when someone asks them for a recommendation. As a freelance SEO expert in Dubai I will tell you plainly: SEO is slower than ads, but it compounds, and the AI-search part is where almost every Dubai competitor is currently asleep.
Explore SEO and AI searchSocial media management is running your organic Instagram, Facebook and similar accounts so they bring enquiries, not just likes. Strategy, calendar, captions, posting, reporting, and creative briefs your designer can use. It supports the paid work instead of living in its own pretty corner.
Explore social media managementThis is building landing pages and conversion-focused websites with WhatsApp and call tracking wired in properly. Your ads are only as good as the page they land on, so I fix both. In the Dubai market, lead campaigns with WhatsApp as the primary action consistently beat plain form-fills, so that is how I build them.
Explore website design and lead generationMost underperforming accounts in Dubai share the same handful of leaks. Here is what I look for in the first few days, before spending a single extra dirham.
| The problem | Why it is costing you |
|---|---|
| Broad match with no negatives | Budget drains on searches that will never buy |
| No conversion tracking | You cannot optimise what you cannot measure |
| Wrong bidding strategy | Maximise Clicks on a lead-gen campaign burns money for traffic |
| Homepage used as the landing page | Visitors arrive with no clear next step and leave |
| One ad set carrying everything | No clean data on what audience or creative actually works |
If you have hired a Dubai agency before, you know the pattern. You meet a senior strategist in the pitch. You sign. Then the work goes to someone junior juggling a dozen accounts, who leaves after a few months and gets replaced by someone who has never heard of your brand. I worked inside agencies before going independent, so I am not guessing.
Work with me and the strategy, the campaigns, the creative briefs and the reports are all mine, every time. For an SME, a startup or an ecommerce brand spending AED 10,000 to AED 200,000 a month, a freelance digital marketing consultant in Dubai usually moves faster and keeps more of your budget in the actual ad account.
| Typical Dubai agency | Working with me | |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs your account | Pitched by a senior, handled by a junior | Mubin, directly, every time |
| Contract | 6-month lock-in, slow to exit | 3 months to start, then month-to-month |
| Response speed | Account-manager middleman | Direct line, no layers |
| Strategy | Template reused across clients | Built for your business and market |
| Your budget | Carries office and staff overhead | Goes into the work, not the overhead |
| Attention | One of fifty-plus accounts | One of a small handful, on purpose |
| Licence | Permit often not held by the operator | Trade Licence 1618922 + Permit 475238 |
The work has clustered in a handful of Dubai sectors where I know the buyer behaviour, the seasonality and the platforms that actually move the needle.
This is the rough shape of the first 90 days. The order matters. Skipping steps to look fast usually costs more later.
Before changing anything I go through your existing campaigns, tracking, landing pages and history. Most of the time there is money sitting on the table we can recover before adding to the budget.
Campaign structure, audience segments, creative briefs and copy, built for your business rather than pulled off a shelf. Tracking goes in first, because data you cannot trust is worse than no data.
The first 30 to 60 days are about finding what works. We run several variables at once, kill the losers quickly, and push budget into the winners. No getting attached to a creative because it took effort to make.
Once there are clear winners, I scale them carefully. Pushing too hard too fast breaks good campaigns. The pace depends on what the account can absorb.
Honest answer: it depends on what you sell, what you charge, how good your offer is, and where your tracking stands today. These are the patterns I see most often, not guarantees.
Move the slider, pick your industry. This gives a rough, honest range based on patterns I see in Dubai accounts — not a promise, a starting point for a real conversation.
For a service business in Dubai, this typically lands in the range below once tracking and structure are clean.
Estimates use blended Dubai CPC/CPL benchmarks. Your actual numbers depend on offer, competition and creative — message me for a number specific to your business.
Illustrative estimate only. Not a guarantee of results.
Pricing should be clear before you pick up the phone. Ad spend is separate, stays in your own account, and is billed by Google and Meta directly. I do not mark it up.
Minimum recommended ad spend is around AED 10,000 to AED 12,000 a month for local lead generation, and roughly USD 5,000 for ecommerce. Below that there is not enough data to test properly, and I would rather say so than take a retainer I cannot move.
If your ads are running and the numbers are not moving, message me on WhatsApp. No long forms, no hard sell. Tell me what you sell and what you are spending, and I will give you one or two things to fix whether you hire me or not. That is the deal.
