Mountain View, California — Google has been giving some serious thought about the (Google Advertising Professionals) program for the past three years. And just yesterday, search engine leader Google has finally ended its age old (GAP) program and replacing it with a new Google AdWords Certification program for those managing AdWords accounts on behalf of advertisers.
This new program introduced mainly by Google to raise their standards as well as to help agencies and their employees with more up-to-date, comprehensive, strategy-focused training and certification on the latest tools and best practices for managing AdWords accounts, reducing the hassles for advertisers finding the certified people easily.
“The Google AdWords API allows developers to develop applications that interact directly with the AdWords platform,” explains Penry Price, Vice President, Global Agency Development at Google. “Agencies and developers of search engine marketing tools use these applications to manage large AdWords campaigns more efficiently and creatively.”
In her post, Price said, this new certification program has been toughened up and its standards has been improved much. Moreover, “Small and medium-sized advertisers who have not previously used an agency have informed us that evaluating potential partners can be a daunting task, so we think Google Partner Search will be especially valuable for them.”
Qualified AdWords Certified Partners who handle client AdWords accounts get free use of the API based on managed client spend. People taking up this program will be awarded with materials related to the recent market trend and highly competitive materials as well.
This includes:
- New training materials to help agencies better understand recent changes in search marketing and AdWords functionality, available via webinar series, learning center, or on-site training at Google.
- More challenging certification exams to test practical application of knowledge and best practices rather than simple recall of knowledge.
- Advanced-level exams to highlight competency in search, display, reporting and analysis.
- A redesigned Certified Partner badge, which includes a “Click to Verify” element so advertisers can view the partner’s profile page for additional information.
The company has also notably minimized the amount of money agencies are required to spend with Google in order to qualify for the stamp of approval. The changes could result in a growth in certification among smaller agencies.
“We want to ascertain that our certification is modernized a little bit,” said Google spokesperson Sandra Heikkinen.
Agencies must meet the new standards within a six month period, and need at least one employee to pass the basic exam and one advanced exam in that time, said Heikkinen. Also raising the bar, Google will require practitioners to take advanced level tests annually rather than every two years.
Individuals must pass the primary level exam and one advanced exam. There will not be any change in the distinction between an individual and a company though certification program changed.
Agencies must have an operational agency profile page to apply for preferred API pricing. To qualify, they must meet the following norms:
- Your company is a Google AdWords Certified Partner.
- You use the AdWords API to manage your customers’ AdWords campaigns (e.g. you are an agency or develop search engine marketing tools).
- Your AdWords API-based tools remain in compliance with the AdWords API terms and conditions, including the required minimum functionality.
“We hope preferred AdWords API pricing will inspire agencies and developers to experiment with new strategies, expand the functionality of their tools, and build more comprehensive client campaigns without worrying about increased costs,” says Price.
Google will begin accepting applications on May 26, 2010.
Detailed API unit calculation model can be found here:
http://www.google.com/support/adwordsapi/bin/topic.py?topic=28590