Yesterday i talked about doing an analytics exam this week. Right after that post i decided to pay for it & start it. I had a look at the questions, paused it and came back to it this morning…
I ended up getting 72% which was good, but not quite good enough 🙂 The pass rate is 80%. Here are my own thoughts on it;
- There’s a lot of ecommerce stuff with adwords and campaign management.
- The questions can be tricky… e.g. not clear enough / you have to make assumptions / several answers look right, but you can only choose one / they’ll differ from ‘select the right answer’ to ‘select the answer that’s NOT right’.
- There’s quite a bit of code involved – you need to know your regular expressions and be familiar with the structure of analytics tracking code.
So overall it’s geared towards the marketing professional who’s using adwords alongside analytics. As usual i mark myself before i submit any exam and i’d worked out that i had about 16-18 ‘possible’ fails. So that meant i got a minimum 52/70 questions right (at least that’s what i thought)….
I ended up getting 72% so that means i got a total of 50.4 questions right, which means i wasn’t very lucky with the questions i guessed / wasn’t sure about. Anyway, there’s a 14 day gap before i can retake the test, which i’ll be doing.
photo credit: silverfuture
I was hoping to just pass this time around and get over 80% but this is now war, so i’ll be aiming for 100% and will have an array of tools & technology at my disposal next time i take it. The exam is open book – nothing to stop you googling answers but because you’re limited to 90 minutes, you really have to have some sort of experience with analytics before you start.
You can also pause the exam as many times as you like over 5 days, so i’ll probably take advantage of that next time around too in order to get my 100% 🙂
Disappointed with failing? Yes, (and this is where the excuses come in) but i know that’s a good thing because i’ll do better next time around and ultimately learn more. I didn’t fail horribly either… had i got another 6 questions right i’d have passed (56/70 was the pass mark and i got 50.4/70).
Give me 2 weeks to think and study, 5 days to take the exam and 3 or 4 screens open in front of me next time around and there won’t be any problems…
Hard luck, but 72% is pretty good considering you didn't take my advice 😉
It is tougher that it seems with the range of questions going from very technical to straight forward. Yes there's a lot of ecommerce based questions and integration between AdWords is always going to be asked. If you check the video's and note the updated & new ones.
You obviously know a bit about GA, but not enough in technical detail(advanced tracking, ecom & adwords integration, cookies?, profiles etc.) – so you might be better off learning how to implement, interpret & manage a GA account that has Goals, AdWords & Ecom turned on over the next 14 days, because some of the questions you won't know unless you've done a little bit of extra tinkering with GA (I don't currently use GA for anything meaningful) Also, who doesn't love RegEx 🙂
One thing I know from Google/Cisco exams is that while some answers may be correct, they are looking for the recommended way. You'll breeze through it next time anyway.
yeah i'm familiar with pretty much everything in GA but don't use the ecommerce side of things at all so that probably cost me most.. you're right, i'll have to play around with it more and of course take my time doing the test next time around 🙂
Also noticed there was several answers that looked right, or that i thought could have been right, so i probably had them down as bankers when in fact they weren't the 'recommended' way to do things as you say…
I want to know whether the same questions will be asked if you re-take the exam.
Thanks
-the Failure