I’m a Google Pro - Certified!
Tuesday, January 17th, 2006
So, over the last week, I’ve been spending a large chunk of my work time learning Google’s AdWords system. They’ve got a pretty neat setup going thanks to Macromedia Breeze — it’s a Learning Center, which reminded me fairly strongly of the learning modules I was subject to in high school. Masterfully narrated (I was charmed by the perfect enunciation of the narrators) and presented in slide format, the Learning Center was concise and well-laid-out. My only suggestion here is that any aspiring Google Advertising Professional bring along a notebook and pen, because it’s dreadfully easy to zone out under the soft, rounded lull of those loyal Google voices.
It’s recommended on the Learning Center page not to attempt the entire thing in one sitting without large amounts of caffeine (thanks, Google — come for the search, stay for the humour) and I’m going to have to second that. Mastering the entire thing can take around eight hours. Even internet marketing can get tiring after eight hours — I know, stunning — so split it up between a couple of days. Each slide presentation is timed from start to finish, and most are between three and eight minutes long. You can pause, play, skip and rewind in the slides, or go from chapter to chapter, and then after each chapter is a quick quiz covering the finer points of the presentations. The quizzes are between two and five questions long and, if you pay enough attention to the corresponding slide presentation, you can easily answer every question correctly.
Bug-wise, I was fairly impressed. There were only three instances in which I found skips or bugs in the Learning Center. Twice, the wrong quiz was associated with a slide presentation, and once, the wrong sound overlay track was matched with a slide. All-in-all it was fairly easy to keep on track. There were very, very few grammatical and spelling errors in the whole thing; a lesser man wouldn’t have noticed any, I suspect.
The Google exam itself is administered by a company called Thomson Prometric. It costs $50 USD, payable immediately online in efficient Google fashion, and is a one-and-a-half-hour long timed test. There’s a practice test available before you start the timer, but I didn’t bother with it as I had just gone through and reviewed with all the Learning Center quizzes. The test format was quite easy to use — it was unobtrusive, and they made it simple to mark questions for later review, go back and forth between questions, or summarize the entire test at any point. Upon completion, they asked me if I was sure I was done (and of course that moment of panic set in — am I really ready to turn it in?), which, I thought, was a nice touch. Nobody wants to waste $50 USD on a misclick.
Anyway, I passed. I am now a Google Certified Advertising Professional. I could tell you (almost) anything about Google Adwords, thanks to their Learning Center setup (and let’s give me some credit, here — it’s at least a little bit due to my enormous dedication). Another reason to love Google above almost any other internet megastar, which, I must admit, I do. A little bit more every day.
