I am happy to announce that I have passed the Adwords Fundamentals and Advanced Display exams!  So once again I am a certified Google Partner, for another year.

Link to my Google Partner profile on Google.

This year, the exam covered many new features of the Adwords system including “Experiments”. You can run one experiment per campaign at a time, testing the performance of different keywords, ads, and ad groups. Your experiment can include existing keywords, ads and ad groups, new keywords, or both.

Other new features and in my opinion great additions are:

• Enhanced reporting – Google is introducing new advanced reporting features, including visualization tools and drag-and-drop interface. This is basically like Excel for AdWords. Instead of having to transfer all your data to Excel for manipulation, you’ll be able to create reporting directly in AdWords with live data.
• Bulk editing capabilities – Soon users will be able to take bulk actions on multiple ads/ad groups/campaigns all at once, something you previously could only do in a tool like AdWords Editor.
• Automated bidding tools – The new automated bidding options allow you to either maximize conversions or maximize revenues. This type of automated bidding was previously only available in third-party platforms.
• “Draft mode” – Google is released a “lab” feature that allows you to make changes in “draft mode.” Since advertisers will be able to see the hypothetical results of those changes, Google says this will enable more data-driven decision making in AdWords.