Google Advertising Professionals Program migration

Google is migrating all of our GAP data from our MCC accounts to the new

Adwords Professionals pages

You can basically access the same data you had in the MCC account, but you can also add and/or manage other GAP professionals linked to your account.

I’m guessing this is the first step into raising the awareness of the Google Advertising Professional (GAP) certification.

Also this could lead into a community (or social network) of GAP professionals looking for work or giving advice and clients seeking what GAPs have to offer…

Taking the GAP exam

Today I took a courage plunge and took the GAP exam, early in the morning… and I passed!

(If you don’t know what the GAP exam is, you can find out on the Adwords Learning Center).

It wasn’t neither hard nor easy. I have to say that you probably won’t pass this exam if you have no practical experience with running adwords campaigns.

I myself am relatively new to Adwords having only 3 months of experience in running campaigns, but these 3 months and the fact that I explored every possible option in the Adwords Account, have helped me understand alot and answer general topic questions.

The exam is graded from 0 to 100% with a 75% grade required to pass.
My exam had 109 questions in 90 minutes. I scored around 85% and I am satisfied with the result. If given more time I would have probably scored higher, but I will have the chance next year as the exam has to be taken once a year to maintain the certification. The test is delivered through Prometric.

I have to note that I had some wrong/faulty questions in my exam. I encountered:

• Incomplete questions;
• Two same answers but only one choice;
• unlabeled answers;
• Also the exam website failed during the test and I had around 1 minute of lost time; not much but nevertheless important for the overall experience;

It seems that I am not the only one that experienced issues with the GAP exam.

By the way, because I wasn’t paying attention in the beginning of my Adwords Experience, I omitted the fact that I need an MCC acount for the 90 days / 1000$ spent requirements (besides taking the exam) in order to achieve the Google Qualified Individual (or GQI) certification.

I have at least until December 15 to spend 1000$ of my hard earned currency!

UPDATE: Right now I am a Google Qualified Individual as you can see by this logo:

You can see the exact certification requirements for becoming a Google Qualified Individual here.

In closing I wish you good luck in taking the exam if you are preparing for it and please post your experience with the GAP exam in the comments section, thanks !