Before the autumn of 2013, it was relatively easy to become a google qualified professional. Google offered online tutorials to be able to learn the necessities needed to pass the required exams. These days however, with the upgrade to Google Partner status, those exams are a lot tougher and less reliant on answers you can find easily on the internet. Instead, Google Partner Search takes another dimension. You have to prove you are able to manage AdWords campaigns effectively. This ensures that those who are qualified are worthy enough to be qualified – which can only be a great thing for the market.
We know exactly how easy it is for companies to set up their own AdWords accounts and campaigns. We also know how easy it is for them to get lost in the AdWords marketing world, wasting money on unwanted clicks returning little or no ROI. Often we see client accounts whom do not value the simple use of match types and often type in keywords not realising they are broad match and thus opening themselves to an untargeted market. Yet, if you don’t know about match types or read up about them, how are you going to know this? On the other end of the scale, we see location based clients such as window cleaners or electricians spending their hard earned cash on clicks being made 300 miles away.
These businesses then enlist one of the thousands of so called ‘professionals’. Yet to become a ‘professional’ in the past was relatively easy and so as a business, how did you know you were enlisting the services of a good reputable professional whom could actually make your PPC account better?
Now, with the Google Partner status, the emphasis is on experience and credentials. The exams to become individually qualified have become much more scenario based (perhaps harder for the newcomers). Within the exam questions, there may be more than one technically right answer meaning it takes shear experience to be able to provide the ‘best’ and ‘most appropriate’ answer Google are looking for. You may be able to recite the Google tutorials word for word, but unless you can adapt it to client use and best practices, that knowledge is now pointless.
Once qualified, you also have to prove your continued merit. Within your managed accounts, you have to demonstrate that the essentials have been mastered and that you’re maximising your client’s campaign performance – and Google will be checking this and will happily remove your Partner status if you don’t conform. Further to this, the MCC spend must be high enough with activity in at least 60 of the last 90 days.
In all, as Google themselves say “Achieving Partner status is not supposed to be easy”. This can only mean that those that do have it, are worthy of it.
If you would like any advice on AdWords management or would like an audit of your existing account, contact us today.
