How long does it take get Bing Ads Professional Accreditation?

Short answer: a day.

I have had some interest in digital marketing and advertising but haven’t really had the time until now to explore it further. I decided what better way than to read the study guides and complete the accreditation of the two big advertising players – Google and Bing. I decided to do Bing’s course first because it seemed to be shorter and there is a more generous credit for your account to try out their ads. As I prefer to learn hands on I felt would be good to try this stuff out in practice with Bing and give Google a try in a little bit.

With Bing you also get a Professional Accreditation (not sure of the value currently) and a listing in their membership directory. This gives you some exposure for potential clients but I think it would mainly be used for checking someone has legitimately received the accreditation. Additionally, you get this rad badge to display on your site/portfolio/fridge :p.

So it only took me around three hours all up over two days to get the Bing Ads Professional Accreditation. But you could easily do it in one day if you allot the time needed.

Here is a table of the estimated times it took me to get through the study content and the final exam:

Here is those times overlayed on the sections and topics of the Bings Ads accreditation:

There is passing grade of 80% for the accreditation and I got right on the money with this exam. Probably means I could’ve spent a bit more time with the study content; however I think there were a few issues with how they set out the content and questions that made it more difficult.

A few gripes with the study guide and exam

• Some of the images in the guide don’t reflect the written content. eg. explaining specific menu options that weren’t in the image.
• Images were sparse in general. There was a lot of content that would really benefit from images to show menu options, configuration etc.
• Information was rehashed a lot throughout and added a little bit more each time a certain feature was brought. I think the guides would benefit from some reorganisation.
• Some of the answers from the exam require you to follow links from the study guide into the Bing Ads documentation. I would have expected all the answer to be found in the study guide but I guess this is beneficial to force people to hunt around and get familiar with the documentation pages.

Overall it was an easy way to get an introduction and entry level accreditation for digital advertising. I’m keen to get in an start playing around with the credit provided by Bing. I also plan to do the Google Ads accreditation as well so I might have some follow up post to compare these two programs.

If you have any questions or input, let me know in the comments below and I will get back to you.