UPDATE Jan 2015: Marketade is not currently a Google Certified Partner.
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Last weekend, for the first time in 15 years, I screamed in joy after passing an exam. Fortunately no one was in the office. I had just gotten a 98% (!) on the 3-hour Google AdWords Search Advertising Advanced Exam — the 2nd of two exams I needed to pass for Marketade to become a Google Certified Partner (along with hitting a certain spend level on AdWords over a 90 day period).
I passed the first exam — the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam — a few weeks ago. It was pretty easy if you’ve used AdWords for a while. But I’d read on various forums that the advanced exams are really tough and you need to know AdWords inside and out, so I spent much of the last week reading through the exam’s study guide and putting the techniques into practice on the client accounts I manage. I started out dreading the study guide, thinking that it was going to force me to learn about a bunch of useless features. But I ended up loving the process and looking forward to each new section. I learned about a lot of great tools and features that I hadn’t used much — like Dimensions reporting. I was especially surprised at how powerful AdWords Editor is. I’d used it before but not nearly to the extent I will now.
Even if we get no new business from this new status, it will have been worth it since we’re now a much smarter search engine marketer. Thanks for the motivation Google!