Google Analytics Quiz failure :(

The Apprentice

Said i,d give it a bash ..

Someone the indept knowledge associated with onsite work i never do or rarely research so questions went totally over my head, i said ah sure i,ll be grand

67% first go .. 50 notes poorer
80 is passable score




Anyone have any decent tutorials or helpful guides to passing this im hoping to do this in another week or two after my said learnings. The harder questions WERE NOT in the standard tutorials that they have online which is frustrating.

Cheers

IRE60

I assume that you're talking the Google Analytic exams....

The Apprentice

Yes rather that.. my initial post made sense in my head when i posted it ..

IRE60

umm- the time stamp!

Yea, I'd literally go through each section on the software with the help screen to guide you and do it practically first.

I'd look at their training videos - they can be a bit dull and you'll mist over at time - but thy are very comprehensive.

C

TsuDhoNimh

The Apprentice wrote: »

The harder questions WERE NOT in the standard tutorials that they have online which is frustrating.

Out of interest, which side of the fence did the 'harder questions' fall?

In the past (back when I last looked at it, so back in the 'conversion uni' days) it was the theoretical questions that were normally the hardest. These were the relatively obscure issues that would only be relevant for <1 in 1000 clients but that were part of the analytics system and were normally to be found in the training info.

In later times, namely the most recent exam I took, the biggest problem was that many of the practical questions weren't based on practical usage. They were out of date and based on old information that was no longer relevant to day to day usage (the training material and exams weren't keeping pace with product development).

I'm not sure how either the training material or exam has changed recently, so my experience is/might be out of date, so interested to hear any up to date thoughts on it.


As a general rule of thumb for the exam...

Spend some time getting a small list of extremely high quality information together relating to analytics. It's an open book exam so having this material open (on a separate machine) during the exam is obviously going to help pull up a few answers you'd otherwise miss, but only if you have a fairly good idea of what material is in which material you have open (otherwise you'll end up wasting time randomly googling for info that you simply don't have time to do in the exam).

Do pull up as much additional material as possible while preparing. There are questions that will be based on the training material but that will go much deeper. You need a combination of the GAIQ training info, the information available via their blogs/forums/help sites and hands on experience to answer all the questions that will be thrown up. The exam is far more theoretical than practical (you'd do better going into the exam with no hands on experience and having just studied the material than you would with extensive experience but no study of the material), but you do need a combination of both in order to hit the 80%.

If you're simply looking to pass the exam and not too worried on the 'how', a very common technique (though I'm sure it's breaking the rules and wouldn't be something I'd advocate or advise) is to leverage the expertise you have available. I'm very aware of larger agencies where the exams are approached in a 'group' effort, with group skype calls used to confer on any questions that aren't immediately obvious to the candidate.


Best of luck on the resit. I'm fairly sure you must leave a minimum of 2 weeks before a resit, so should be more than enough time for you to swat up and hit the pass mark no problem.

The Apprentice

Hi TsuDoNimH thanks for the Pm btw, i still havent a chance to reply trying to get some work done :P

Ye to stay on Topic Yes the Resit is in Another week or so really and truly i have no intention of bringing it further as a lot of the information is Really technical to be fair, to pick your points

Ye i did have a good old snoop via google and you can pause the test but its not really feasible to keep pausing and looking for the answer every time, as the window shuts and details are closed down. I find Yes you CAN use the same terminal and swop out with Firefox and Chrome, but not with an individual Singular Browser
There seems to be some very hard questions concerning Coding, of the actual Html with different layouts (3) with slight changes, and ive designed very basic websites before and have a good understand of it but it went beyond me.. so it was rather frustrating.

My overall view was the Data was not relevant and some of the questions were VERY technical, the university was or is not really being updated i would guess since you have done it but the perhaps the questions have with some sneaky ones which we all suspected.
Overall i think it was a good score, but im bitter i couldnt get it first time it was a lot harder than i expected..

Adieu, to the Test centre :P

TsuDhoNimh

From what I've glanced at just now, the test appears to have moved further away from factual questions and more towards logical reasoning questions. That's something I'm actually glad to see in theory, it requires and shows more knowledge and not a 'regurgitate the facts' effort (something I always disliked about both analytics and adwords certification), but it might also explain some of the HTML questions you found to be a little from left field and might throw up a large number of abstract/niche details depending on your luck on the day.

Google seems to be using help articles and the developers guide along with the official material when forming questions, so some time spent on those resources might be fruitful.

You can pause and swap windows alright, but in general it's either going to be something you know (or should know) or else something that would take far too long to try and reason out in a single sitting. If trying to game the exam in that manner it'd be very easy to identify if reviewing the time taken to progress, so certainly wouldn't suggest anything along those lines and would expect to see it lead to a wiping of the certification (although I've never actually heard of one being wiped, so maybe not).

The training material has certainly been updated (slightly?), but I'm not sure if it's changed much in terms of content or if it's mostly just cosmetic. I'd assume it's a little of both.

I'll be looking at sitting again inside the next six months, so guess I'll find out for sure shortly enough. Feel free to throw up any other thoughts on the experience or material you found particularly helpful, I'm sure plenty of users (I'd certainly be one of them) would appreciate it.