When the PPC team decided to (re)write our Google Advertising Professional (GAP) exams recently, we had no idea that AdWords were in the process of changing the learning centre as well as the exam. In fact, we literally woke up on exam day to find out that the entire learning centre had been changed around (mild panic).

Our next obstacle was finding a link to the exam from the learning centre - there currently isn’t one! So the old hats (who had done the GAP exam before) headed to the AdWords Pro Centre and registered for the Prometric Exam as we have always done.

The new recruits, having all recently done the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) exam, headed to google.starttest.com and signed up for the test there.

It was about this time that we realised that the exams had different names. Half of us had signed up for the Google AdWords Professional Exam while the other half had signed up for the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam.

An email to Google confirmed our suspicions – Google are phasing out the old GAP exam and phasing in the new Google Advertising Fundamentals (GAF?) exam.

So, seeing as though half the team wrote the old test, and the other half wrote the brand new test, we thought we would do a quick comparison.

The old GAP exam is based at Prometric and costs $50 to write. It is 90 minutes long and has 110 questions in multiple choice format. The day we wrote it was incredibly slow loading and some of the questions were just plain ambiguous.

The new exam is based at http://google.starttest.com, along with the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) exam (both $50 to write). It is the same format as the GAIQ exam – and full screen so you can’t have a web browser open at the same time. Unlike the GAIQ exam, you can’t pause it and come back. At 2 hours, it’s also longer, although we found that more than sufficient to complete the 120 questions.

Overall we thought the level of question was harder on the new exam and there were more “apply your knowledge” questions (Tammy calls them "story sums"). As with the old exam, careful reading of the learning centre is a must.

One tip worth sharing is where to find your “Candidate ID”, without which you can’t write the new exam. This elusive number can be found in your AdWords Certified Partner Program account in the “My Exams” section.

I have searched for official Google word on phasing out the old exam but can’t find any. The writer of this blog post says Google has warned that anyone writing the old exam now will have to write the new exam in 2010. I know there are also plans for additional exams, so watch this space.