After nine months of preparation, tens of hours of close cooperation between Yandex and Webcertain employees, hundreds of corrections and rewrites, endless meetings in Moscow, London and Barcelona, the first edition of the Global PPC Manager Course has just finished. And boy did it finish well!
But before I start praising the performance of the course attendees, let me explain what the Global PPC Manager Course is?
Officially approved by Russian search leader Yandex and delivered by Webcertain, The Global PPC Manager is a 3-day intensive training course which aims to equip international search marketers with all the essential knowledge and tools to thrive with PPC advertising on Yandex, Baidu and Naver.
It has been designed to cover everything from the account opening steps, keyword research, ad requirements through bidding options to reporting functionalities – basically everything needed by a marketer to go away and start managing his or her own campaigns on the leading search platforms in China, Russia and South Korea.
Taking place in sunny Barcelona, the vibrant capital of Catalonia, the city seems to be the perfect setting for combining learning during the day with hedonism in abundance at night – be it trying out Spanish tapas and local sangria, seeing Gaudi’s world famous La Sagrada Familia, or even learning a few Flamenco moves (some of us actually did the latter during the last night of our stay).
All delegates passed the Yandex.Expert exam
On the final day of the course, all delegates are given the opportunity to test their newly gained Yandex knowledge by taking the difficult Yandex.Expert Exam. Exceeding our wildest dreams, the entire first group of attendees managed to pass it and will soon get the shiny certificate you see to the left through their doors as proof of their acquired Yandex expert status!
Needless to say, that put a big smile on my face, especially given the difficulty of the test and my own personal struggles with passing it.
After spending a lot of time with the search engine’s specialists at the Yandex Moscow headquarters learning about the Yandex.Direct system you would think that passing the test was an easy task for me. The only minor detail was the fact that I did not speak Russian at all at that point and the test was written all in Russian!
I sat down with a Yandex account manager who was translating it all for me…
We had 30 minutes to do the test and 25 questions to answer, giving us just over a minute to answer each question. I remember this moment as the most intense 30 minutes of my life – trying to understand and answer correctly highly technical questions (oh yes, Yandex like their geeky questions).
Though I did not pass my first attempt, I believe 85% was not a bad result at all! And as they say, you learn the most from your mistakes and eventually I did pass it.
Upcoming courses
The next course will take place in less than two weeks’ time but is already fully booked; however, there are still a few slots left for the following October course, so if you are looking to ramp up your international PPC skills, be quick! And we will be heading to Las Vegas in November to offer the course there.
Certainly, the bar has been set high by the first group… but I am confident we will get you to that level as well. I, for one, expect nothing less than another 100% pass rate. I hope to see you soon in Barcelona and if you wish to learn more about the course, you can do so here.
Justyna Wilner
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