Paddy Moogan Blog

Passing the Microsoft adExcellence Exam

1st July 2009 · Paddy · 2 Comments »

You may remember from my post on Passing the Google Analytics Exam that I mentioned my next target was to pass the Microsoft AdExcellence Exam. I got a bit of time last week to spend revising so I started going through the adExcellence classroom. It is very similar to the format of the Google Adwords learning centre although not as good .  I got through the learning classes within a few hours, despite a few distractions what with a new website going live at the same time!

I passed the exam with a score of 91.5%, not quite sure where they got the 0.5% from as it was a 100 question exam.  Anyway it wasn’t that tricky to be honest, if you’ve worked with Adwords for any amount of time then many of the principles apply.

The classroom presentations are actually pretty detailed and I liked how they presented a lot of the information in diagrams. I’m not sure if they are in the middle of updating them but there wasn’t really any consistency to the way the presentations were displayed. Apart from that it was pretty good.

I know a few readers are interested in taking the exam so I’ve put together some tips.

Tips for Passing the Microsoft adExcellence Exam

• Concentrate on the main reasons why Ads are disapproved, things such as firearms, tabacco etc
• Learn about the use of trademarks in Ads
• Make a note of the maximum character lengths for Titles, Descriptions, URLs etc
• Learn about the dynamic keyword insertion tool and the variables you can add to each keyword

I’d personally concentrate on these points.

Hope that helps you guys, now that MSN Live has rebranded itself as Bing, I’m going to be looking a lot closer at it and how it develops as a search engine.  Traditionally I’ve always received better conversion rates and ROI from MSN traffic.  Be interesting to see if this continues with Bing.