Well, I finally joined the Google Advertising Professionals program. I’ve been juggling a lot of customer accounts and keeping track of all their details seperately was killing me! The Google Advertising Professionals program offers My Client Center which lets me manage everyone’s accounts (minus their billing information) from one place. I hope this is a great time saver for me!

If my clients exceed $1000 in ad purchases, I will be qualified to take an exam to become a “Qualified” Google Advertising Professional. We will see if it goes that way.

I am not new to the ‘certification’ game– I had to get several certifications from Microsoft for past-life careers in technical support. I am also fully aware that passing a test isn’t the end-all-be-all way of determining whether someone is qualified to actually perform a job function or task. My techie friends and I talk about ‘paper MSCEs’ all the time. Basically, there is nothing better than real-life experience to make someone qualified as an expert in a field.

I find it interesting that Google ties the qualification to money spent (by my clients). On one hand, I can see that you really cannot gain *experience* if you’re not using the program and to use the program, well, you have to Pay for clicks. On the other hand, I work really hard at STRETCHING my clients’ budgets! Most my clients are small businesses or individual entrepreneurs. I want to make the most of their money and get the best ROI, so I’m not spending hand over fist on the most expensive keywords. I even try to find ways to get them FREE credits so they can try the program without putting up cash first. I don’t want to feel like I need to overspend my client’s money, so for that I may end up be given the opportunity to ‘qualify’ to take the test. Again, we will see and, of course, I will post the results here.