How to Get Google to Train Your Entire Staff on Google Analytics—for FREE

Since we work every day in this industry, it’s easy to think there’s not much we haven’t seen before. But in reality, there’s tons we haven’t seen before.

A few months ago, I came across a site where someone displayed a badge saying his agency was a certified partner in Google Analytics—by Google itself. I’ve seen the PPC certification badges for years, but I had no idea there was certification for Google Analytics (it was apparently launched in 2009).

Becoming a certified partner isn’t easy so to speak. There’s proficiency requirements, business requirements, preferred qualities, and continuing education requirements like agreeing to send at least one employee to the Google Analytics Certified Partner Summit every year at your own expense and reporting about your Analytics work back to Google.

That’s a hell of a lot of hoops. At PushFire, we’re certified partners for Google AdWords since we offer PPC management services as a primary service offering (and we require all of the members of our PPC team to get individually certified as well). We’re more than capable with analytics, but we don’t offer it as a core service, so the certification process seems like a distraction for us at best.

But what caught my eye about the certification program was its Conversion Universitysection. On that page, you learn two things:

1. There is a Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) test (which requires you to pay $50 to be tested and complete the IQ test of 70 questions in 90 minutes with a grade of 80 percent to pass and has way less hoops)
2. There is an opportunity to get damn near a “free degree” so to speak in using Google Analytics there—whether you chose to get certified as an individual, partner agency or not.

HOLLA!

How We’re Leveraging This Free Training As An Agency

How to Get Google to Train Your Entire Staff on Google Analytics—for FREE!

One of the things that (I like to think) makes working at PushFire different than many other companies is that we’re very interested in ensuring our employees receive continual education in the search marketing space (such as the PushFire Lending Library that is stocked with tons of business and marketing books our team is free to check out and read).

We decided to set aside two hours each week to group train our entire staff on Google Analytics, whether they’re using it is part of their job description or not. We air as many of the Conversion University presentations as we can on our projection screen during that time and have a Q&A with our team led by our more advanced GA users (read, our PPC department) to answer any questions the team has after each video airs.

When we’ve completed all the training as a team, we’re going to pay the $50 dollar fee for each employee who wants to become individually certified—officially—once they pass a practice test (tons of them out there, but I’ve heard good things about Google Analytics Test.com, so that’s the one we’ll use), which everyone will be taking. We also plan to offer a $100 dollar gift card to every team member who passes the official Individual Qualification test.

Why We’re Leveraging This Free Training As An Agency

The reasons we’d want certain members of our team (the ones working with Google Analytics) to get this training is obvious. But why the heck would we train the team members who don’t? To increase overall morale, confidence, education, knowledge, and the benefits working at PushFire brings to our staff.

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Olivier Le Moal

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