GAIQ Exam - What I learned

     Have you been considering taking the GAIQ (Google Analytics Individual Qualification) Exam?  If you have reached this web page by a web search engine, you probably know what the GAIQ is.  If not, I have written a brief description of the exam and what it means.

     I recently prepared for and passed the exam and wanted to share what I learned about the GAIQ exam.  There is an enormous amount of information on this topic, but the exam was not entirely what I anticipated from reading other web pages.

     How is the GAIQ exam different than I expected?

• My exam did not contain any check all that apply questions.  When looking at the study questions others have posted, I expected to see many of them.  They can be quite intimidating.  I did encounter "all of these apply" or "none of these apply" in the multiple choice answers, but of the 70 questions, I never had the opportunity to select more than a single answer.

• The questions are not tricky.  I began the test with (admittedly) some anxiety as having to wait another week to retake the exam was not something I wanted to do.  Plus, it would be an ego bust.  Just remember to look for the words always and required in test questions as they have specific meanings.

• You can miss 16 questions and still pass.  While I knew this coming into the exam, that is a lot of questions to miss.  I used scratch paper to keep track of how many questions I was unsure about and was pretty close (I missed a few).  If you get uncomfortable, you can always use the search in google analytics without cheating since it is an open book test.

• 90 minutes is a lot of time for this test.  Some postings have indicated that you should not spend more than 1 1/2 minutes per question.  I found that many of the questions were relatively easy and could have spent much longer on challenging questions.

     If you are still reading this, you may be wondering why I was interested in earning the certification.  I really wanted to learn how the process of tracking works.  After all, google is a company that is clearly making money, a lot of it.  According to the google website, the fourth quarter earnings in 2014 were 18 billion dollars.  I did not understand how they earned their money and believed learning google analytics would provide enough information to learn their business model (I did).

     If you are interested in learning about how google works, follow my test preparation method and you will understand the fundamentals of the google model as well as have no difficulty passing the exam.  My time investment was spread over a week and a half (not full time).