A New (Google) Partnership

Becoming Google Partner is a honoured accomplishment for our small web development team. To become a partner we had to accomplish and maintain three impressive feats that help Google know we’re an accomplished marketing agency. Fortunately these requirements from Google are open knowledge, an explanation of each of them is below.

Having great performance means nothing without results, and to show results you need to have your adverts running as well as they can. This can’t be proven unless high budget ad campaigns are running. Therefore Google made the requirement of managing  a $10,000 USD spend over the previous 90-day period, so it has to be maintained for us to have Google Partner. Currently that equates to around £90 per day.

To accomplish this we couldn’t do much but trust our advertising and clients. We don’t push to spend more on advertising as we’re aware you know your budget well. But our clients have seen the results of their advertising work well and have decided to increase spending and with their combined efforts we have reached the threshold.

Having good performance and budget is obviously important but it alone doesn’t prove how good a marketing agency is, often we manage ads that have been created by someone else and minimal changes are needed to increase optimisation to a high enough level to pass for Partner and the amount of money used on campaigns can be a very easy threshold for some to maintain as it’s a simple money requirement. Therefore Google decided to also make Certifications for agencies to complete.

Each certificate requires hours of learning and ends in a roughly 1.5h test where you need scores of 80 or 90% and above to pass. The number of users who are required to have the certificates is dependant on the size of the company. Because we’re small we only need one person to have done this certification, but that’s fine because that one person manages our advertising! So all your ads will be managed by a certificate holder.