If you’re taking your Google Analytics Individual Certification exam for the first time, or renewing an expired certification, this blog post will provide a quick rundown of everything you need to know about the exam—how to prepare for it, what’s on it, and how to pass it on the first try.
We also have a guide for passing the Google Ads exams if you’re interested in those certifications too. Otherwise, read on to learn more about the Google Analytics exam.
About The google analytics CERTIFICATION
The Google Analytics Certification exam is a 90-minute test made up of 70 questions. The exam covers everything from basic account setup, configuration, and vocabulary to more advanced tactics, custom reports, and segments for deeper analysis of data. It also covers basic marketing strategies like remarketing and attribution modeling. This exam and its training courses are a great way for new Google Analytics users to learn how to use the platform to its fullest potential, and for existing Google Analytics users to learn about new features and reports, or to gain more experience with features and reports they might not use often.
What’s New ON THE analytics Exam?
Much of the exam material is still the same, but there is an added focus on new reports and their accompanying features, custom reports, measurement and tracking, and an added focus on how to best use segmentation.
If you have previously taken and passed an analytics exam, I’d suggest taking the assessments after each unit in Google’s education and exam platform, Skillshop. You can then use your missed questions as a guide to help you know what you need to focus on to pass the exam again. After each assessment, you will be able to see the questions you missed, and you’ll be guided to the related lesson to review the information.
There are also some new courses and exams this year in addition to the individual certification exam:
- Discover the Next Generation of Google Analytics: This course is more focused on performance measurement using the new Google Analytics 4 platform and its properties.
- Achieve Tagging Excellence: This course helps users understand how and why to tag campaign traffic to help measure ad effectiveness, and to find which tagging strategy is best for your goals.
In addition to the three core exams and certifications, Google has also included designations in analytics mastery for Beginner, Advanced, and Power Users. To achieve these levels, you’ll just need to pass the assessments in the Google Analytics Academy with a score of 80% or higher. These assessments are not timed, and are much shorter than the certification exams, with 5-10 questions per assessment. Unlike the certification exam, you can see which questions you missed, and you can take these multiple times in a row until you pass.
How to Prepare for the Google Analytics ExaM
To prepare for the exam, the Skillshop lessons are pretty much all you need.
The individual certification, next generation, or tagging excellence courses are all organized the same way: A knowledge check assessment and a study course with guided interactive lessons, videos, explanations, and knowledge assessments along the way. The next generation and tagging excellence courses also include pre- and post-self knowledge assessments to help identify spaces where you have more to learn, and to check how much you’ve learned along the way.
If you interact regularly with Google Analytics in a reporting and measurement capacity, the courses should be quite easy to complete, and the certification exam should be pretty easy too. I still recommend taking all the guided courses and tours just to make sure you’re up to date with the latest reports and features.
If you’re new to Google Analytics, I recommend making sure you understand questions you missed on in-progress assessments, revisiting those lessons, and retaking the assessments until you get a perfect score. It would also be great to have access to a Google Analytics account with a high volume of historic data.
What’s On The Exam
The Google Analytics exam will cover:
- Account setup and configuration
- Default metrics and dimensions (as well as possible combinations of the two)
- Custom metrics and dimensions
- Reports (default and custom, with an emphasis on custom reports)
- Segments, and how best to use them
- Campaign measurement, tracking, and UTM setup
- Remarketing
- Basic Google Ads principles
- Attribution modeling
- Multi-channel funnels
Everything that’s on the exam will be included in the Skillshop training, so if you have no idea what some of these things are, don’t sweat it. Just make sure you pass each assessment and you should be good in shape for the certification exam.
What Resources To Use During The Exam
When it’s time to take the exam, you’ll do so using Skillshop. During the exam, I found it super useful to have the following tabs open in my browser.
- The Skillshop courses and assessments
- The Google Help Center
- An active Google Analytics account with plenty of historic data, or the Demo Account used in training
Anything Else?
If you’ve never worked in Google Analytics before, it’d be best to take your time on the courses and assessments. It would also benefit you to pay very close attention to the guided tours through the demo account offered in Skillshop, as seeing real accounts and data helps bring the principles and optimization strategies to life.
That’s it! Best of luck, test takers!