Tips for Taking the Google AdWords Exam

Google offers its Professional AdWords Exam to those SEO marketers who qualify. In order to qualify to take the exam, a marketer must have managed at least $1000 worth of Google AdWords. The test is administered by a 3rd party at this location and costs $50 for each attempt. If you fail the exam, you must pay another $50 to retake the exam.

Generally speaking, the most important resource to preparing and studying for the exam is located at the Google AdWords Learning Center. My suggestion is to thoroughly go through every section listed at least once, even the beginner sections with which you might already be very familiar.

Trouble spots or sections where you do not have experience should be studied multiple times. Another important thing to stress is TAKE NOTES. The Google AdWords Professional exam is open book, and any notes you take on particularly challenging aspects will be very useful during the test.

You may be thinking to yourself, as I did, “well, since this exam is online I can just look up each question as I get them, right?” No, you cannot. The exam provides 90 minutes to finish (in my case) 117 questions. It would have been impossible for me to look up even a majority of the questions online and still complete the test in time, and I am very fast with multiple choice tests.

Someone who is very new to the material or is not good at taking multiple choice tests within a time limit will do very poorly if they rely on looking up each answer. Study the Learning Center, do the quizzes, take notes on trouble spots, and you will do fine.

Another helpful tip I would like to offer is to note that Google has two ways of studying the material. You can either watch flash videos or read text. Google states that you can do either and still be adequately prepared for the exam. My suggestion is to go through each type of learning process at least once. Surprisingly, there is information left out of the flash video presentations that is included in the text presentations and vice versa.

One last thing to note is the material and the test is not recent. I found some glaring errors on the learning material that is not up-to-date Google policy. For example, the material explains the difference between a display URL and a destination URL in a text ad, but Google recently changed their policy so that there should be no difference whatsoever between a display URL and a destination URL.