You’ve decided to get someone to manage your Adwords account and the company you are going to pick is proudly displaying their Google Adwords Qualified Company Logo. So you can relax knowing your account will be managed by a Qualified individual.

Wrong. Its does not guarantee that at all.

You would be forgiven for thinking that a company that proudly displays the Google Adwords Qualified Company Logo must have lots of highly qualified individuals. Surely that’s what the award means doesn’t it.

Well in fact it doesn’t. It doesn’t promise anything of the kind.

The truth of the matter is that Google offer two qualifications for professional status.

The first is as an Adwords Qualified Individual. Anyone with this qualification has passed the Google examination and all its other criteria to become a qualified individual.

To become an Adwords Qualified Company the criteria is as follows (taken direct from Google’s help files):

1) Have a billing and mailing address in a country where company qualification is available.
2) Employ at least two Qualified Individuals in the program. Individuals must be qualified under the main company-registered My Client Center account and not their own account.
3) Build and maintain the minimum 90-day required total client spend (spend requirements vary by country) for the company’s My Client Center account

So any company, no matter how large, only needs to have TWO Qualified Individuals to claim to be a Qualified Company.

My worry here is that anyone hiring someone from an Adwords Qualified Company may assume that they are getting a Qualified Individual to run their Adwords campaigns. Of course you might but then again you might not!

My advice is to check before you hire any company that you are getting what you think you are paying for. Ask who is going to manage your account and ask for their Adwords Professional ID so that you can check for yourself that they have indeed passed the criteria.