I did it! I passed and received my individual qualification (IQ) for Google Analytics. Hurray! And Whew!
The site offers a way to look up people who have passed their IQ test so you can verify if someone has it (here’s mine). I wouldn’t call myself an expert yet, since I think expertise comes with more and more experience. The test itself had well-worded questions, and you need 80% correct out of 70 questions.
I got 81% correct (hence, the whew). I double-checked all my answers, and if I didn’t know an answer for certain, I looked up information either in the Conversion University site or the Google Analytics help site.
With 90 minutes to take the test, my look-up-to-verify method would not have worked for all the questions, and I had to be quite familiar with the University lessons in order to verify what I needed quickly. I wish I could find out more about my incorrect answers. Apparently I need to work more on ecommerce, which makes sense since I’ve never run an ecommerce site so I don’t have hands-on experience with one.
Why pay for an individual qualification? Avinish Kaushik has an excellent post where he says for every $100 you invest in web analytics, you should spend $10 on tools and $90 on people with the brain power to think about the results from the tools. So for me, it made sense to test my brain power on a tool, but I realize that each site needs its own analyst behind it to choose the measurements and connect the site to the business.