Is The Google Ads Certification Exam Worth It in 2025?

if you're new to Google ads and you're just getting started and you're looking at areas of training to take to improve your skills you would have definitely come across the Google ads certification program and this program allows you to take numerous courses to understand how to use the different functions of Google ads and other adjacent products to Google ads to improve your skills and better your potential as an Advertiser the question we're going to answer today is whether or not the certification program is actually worth the time is it worth investing your time and effort

into taking this program and completing a very formal exam in order to improve your skills in Google ads when you go into the Google certification system you're going to come across a ton of different courses and training modules based on various elements of Google ads including display search video measurement many other areas as well but because the majority of people who start Google ads do it for search campaigns we're going to use this in the example to determine whether or not you should be Tak taking these exams now the materials themselves for the examination have

come a very long way I remember the days of when the materials were just a pure block of text you had to read to extract the information you needed to get the results in the exam now nowadays you have diagrams you have video you have content that's a lot more digestible and readable meaning that the certification program is a bit more easy to take than it used to be which is good because ultimately you want the program to be digestible as somebody who's been in Google ads for a long time you will probably notice there

is an ulterior motive Google are invoking within the materials however let's take a look staying with the theme of the search examination looking at the keyword research materials within the certification and let me know if you can spot the massive assumption Google is making to try and push their narrative so as you go through the materials you'll see it so it shows you how to build an effective keyword strategy it tells you about match types exact phrase and Broad match interestingly they put broad match last which is an interesting one it talks about close variance

so all of these things are things that are interesting and necessary to learn when you're developing a Google ads strategy so this is good now as you go down it talks about broad match and cover all of the queries so broad match again is getting a big highlight here there's a big gold glowing light bulb here talking about with broad match there's no need to add the same keyword in exact or phrase let broad match do it all using AI to incover queries so it's a big push on Broad match there it about switching to

a broad match strategy again pushing broad match pushing that narrative I'm going to explicitly tell you this I know I told you to spot it but it's pretty obvious here they are pushing broad match massively in this article and as you go further down again it talks about applying recommendations automatically and it says you're in control of which recommendations you'd like to apply so in reality you're not in control this is all about automation so you can see recommendations you can see mix and match from both bundles of recommendations you can see down here it

talks about this as well so the keyword strategy side of things and understanding match types is important that's good but on the other hand Google are massively pushing broad match so if you're a new Advertiser going into this you're going to be using broad match straight away and that's not always going to be good in fact broad match typically works for about 10 to 15% of accounts that I look at the majority do not benefit from broad match then they've got optimization score now I've talked about optimization score before it's basically a score Google gives

you based on how closely you're following what they want you to do and you can see right here in the materials optimization score is something Google wants you to get better with and wants you to improve and wants you to know so when it comes to doing this it shows you specifically that Google have a very specific narrative on how they actually want you to set things up this section here is good so it talks about how to organize your key keywords by themes into ad groups great that's perfect for learning it talks about looking

at the Search terms report to understand which queries are being triggered they don't necessarily mention that they actually took away most of the Search terms you can see but we'll park that aside for now it looks good this this is good stuff it talks about use of negative keywords to make sure that your traffic is right but this section is very small compared to all of this mention of broad match optimization score and automations as well there's the problem so now you can understand why there's an issue with the exam because Google have their own

narrative they are trying to push and as a new Advertiser this could set you in the completely wrong direction now should you take the exam the answer to me is it depends first of all if you're going for a job as somebody who's not been in PPC for a very long time then the answer is of course yes because a lot of employers don't understand Google ads directly and they think the certification means you can use Google ads effectively now I can understand why they would do that they need some kind of qualifying criteria to

make sure they're getting the right applicants so if you're somebody pretty new in the game and trying to get your foot in the door then yes you need that on your resume or as they say here in the UK your CV however if you've been in the game as long as I have when you've got 12 13 years experience behind you it's not going to matter they don't really care about seeing that on your resume because you've got years of experience across multiple companies with plenty of references that shows you know how to use Google

ads so it's not as important it's more of a box ticking exercise another reason a lot of people might be looking at the Google ads exam is of course if you run an agency because your scores from your exam and having enough people qualified with the examinations are tied directly to your partner status with Google if you want Google partner status or you want Google Premier partner status you have to have people take the exam and pass the relevant exams in order to get that status so again it's another box ticking exercise but the biggest

takeaway for the Google ads exam for generally speaking most people who have done Google ads for a little while and who want to get better results from their ads you don't really need it it's not that important look if you're not going for an agency title or you're not going for a job when you're early on in your career you don't really need it there is no replacement for experience for running your own campaigns getting results and trying to see how to improve things through testing through learning and other areas like that there's no replacement

for that whatsoever that's the best way to learn so by conf ating things when you look at the materials I showed you with what Google wants you to do versus what gets results in the field you can understand why actually it doesn't really make sense to take this exam and use it as a training tool when you get to a certain level it just doesn't make sense and it can cause confusion and actually cause you to get worse results for your campaigns the other issue with this examination is the fact they don't give you direct

tutorials in platform they don't really show you specifically how to manage campaigns how to read the data going through the system taking the steps in order to optimize performance within a live account they don't show you any of this they kind of go through mostly Theory and theory is no substitute for practical demonstrable skill that's the other thing to remember as well so in some scenarios yes the exam is worth taking if you're new in the game or need it on your resum slcv in order to get a job then great if you're not new

to the game and you don't need it on your resume then don't get caught up in doing it especially if you're not an agency or freelancer who wants partner status it's just not worth it you're better off trying things in the field yourself watching YouTube channels like this one and the many others out there that are doing a good job of teaching Google ads and that is the best way to develop by going into the field doing things yourself testing learning failing and growing the examination is not going to give you that and as I

say it's going to cause confusion if you listen too much to Google Oh and before I forget I also want to take a shot at all of the these weird fake gurus who say that you can take the Google ads exam and then go ahead and start taking clients on because you've got this certification and the reason that this is Despicable behavior is if you've never run a Google ads campaign before you read the materials and you pass the exam and you start taking clients on you're actually deceiving these clients you're going to charge top

dollar for something you've never done before something you've never developed before you're going to lose them a bunch of money and if you go to the Reddit PPC page it shows you tons of people who do EX exactly this and it really harms my industry and I don't like it so I want to leave that as a parting shot as well the Google ad certification if you're seeing all of these YouTube videos talking about how you can become a very highly paid consultant by taking this examination and advertising the fact you've taken it and you're

certified then you're an idiot I'm sorry but apart from that I hope you enjoyed watching this video like this video if you liked it don't forget to subscribe check out the other videos across my channel and I'll see you guys on the next one