Equinet Academy Review 2019: Google Ads Fundamentals Course

If you’re looking to attend a digital marketing course in Singapore, my top tip would be to choose one offered by a training provider specialising in digital marketing courses.

Because no offence, but I’m not sure that a training provider that offers practically all courses under the sun (digital marketing + Chemistry + hydroponics, anyone?) will be able to give you the best digital marketing training you can get for your buck.

Instead of taking a gamble on such training providers, check out Equinet Academy.

Equinet Academy is a dedicated digital marketing training provider, offering more than 10 different courses to anyone looking to upgrade their digital marketing skills.

It was founded by Dylan Sun who is a digital marketing practitioner in his own right, so you can be sure that its courses go through very high quality controls.

Since its founding in 2013, Equinet Academy has seen more than 4,000 students pass through its doors. And yes, it’s ranking on Google page 1 for keywords such as “digital marketing course singapore” 😉

Being a complete noob in Google Ads, I signed up for Equinet Academy’s Google Ads Fundamentals course. This is a 2-day (SkillsFuture-claimable!) course that teaches the basics of setting up and running your own Google Ads campaigns.

After attending the course on 18 and 19 February 2019, I can confidently say I would definitely recommend it and Equinet Academy to anyone. What impressed me? Read on to find out!

Contents Menu

• Convenient Course Location
• Competent and Experienced Course Trainer
• Engaging and Hands-on Teaching Style
• Lifetime Access to Detailed Course Resources
• Course “Exams” to Reinforce Our Knowledge of Concepts

Convenient Course Location

All of Equinet Academy’s training courses are conducted at International Plaza, which is really convenient to get to.

Just take the MRT to Tanjong Pagar station, then follow the signs for Exit C.

(Exit C is on the right after you exit the fare gantries. If you see this sign (click the image to enlarge), you’re on the right track:

You’ll find yourself at the foot of International Plaza after emerging from the Exit C escalator!

Competent and Experienced Course Trainer

Equinet Academy’s courses are conducted by industry practitioners, which ensures that attendees will learn about the latest digital marketing trends and practices.

The Google Ads Fundamentals course is currently being conducted by Lin Xuanbin (XB for short), a digital campaign manager with a global information services company. He’s the guy handing me my Certificate of Completion in the photo above!

XB has over 8 years of digital marketing experience in private companies (both large and small) and government agencies, and he definitely knows his stuff.

When showing us how to set up our Google Ads campaigns for example, XB made sure to go through all the settings – including those that Google sneakily tries to hide from you.

Because if you miss out on such “hidden” settings, you may be giving Google more control over how to run your ads (and hence how fast it spends your money).

In fact, that was one of the things XB emphasised during the course:

“If Google tries to hide certain settings from you, make sure to open them up to see what they are.”

Wise words.

XB has also done both client-side work and agency-side work. As a result, he was able to share with us the common mistakes that agencies may make when handling Google Ads campaigns.

If you’ve hired an agency, you’ll find such insights really valuable in ensuring the agency isn’t wasting your Google Ads budget.

Engaging and Hands-On Teaching Style

Have you ever attended a course where the trainer just droned on and on and on, until you lost focus and started falling asleep?

Rest assured, Equinet Academy’s Google Ads Fundamentals course is NOT like that.

There were plenty of hands-on activities to get us involved in the learning process. As mentioned above for example, we got to set up our own Google Ads search and display campaigns while XB guided us step by step.

Another hands-on activity I benefited a lot from was writing our own search ads.

The class was split into groups, with each group tasked with writing a search ad for one of our coursemates’ companies.

Afterwards, we gave feedback on each others’ ads. We also compared them with live Google ads that our real-life competitors had bought. If you’ll be writing Google ads for your own business, you’ll find this exercise really useful!

I also picked up a few pointers from XB that I probably wouldn’t have realised on my own.

For example, make sure that you’ve included all important information in Headlines 1 and 2 and Description 1. Because there’s no guarantee Headline 3 and Description 2 will show up in your ad.

(No idea what I’m talking about? You will, after you’ve attended the course 😉 )

Lifetime Access to Detailed Course Resources

In terms of course material, each of us was given lifetime access to the Equinet Academy Google Ads course resource library. This resource library consisted of:

• The slides used during the workshop
• After-training support

The slides were well-designed and contained clear explanations. I’ll be whipping them out if I need to refresh my memory on certain concepts in the future.

Or if you’re really stuck while trying to implement what you’ve learnt during the course, you can also request for after-training support.

Depending on the kind of assistance you need, Equinet Academy may offer support options such as a phone consultation or face-to-face meeting with a trainer, or a free refresher seat.

Finally, this isn’t part of the advertised course material, but you’ll also get access to a demo Google Ads account.

For this account, Equinet Academy paid actual money to run test ads to show us the metrics we expect to see after we start running our own ad campaigns. A really thoughtful gesture, in my opinion!

Course “Exams” to Reinforce Our Knowledge of Concepts

Mock quizzes

For some courses, you may just get a Certificate of Completion after attending them. But Equinet Academy’s Google Ads Fundamentals course is different.

Instead, it leads up to the taking of Google’s own Google Ads Fundamentals certification exam.

In other words, apart from getting a Certificate of Completion, you may also leave the course with a Google Ads Fundamentals certificate from Google itself!

So over the 2 days of the course, we went through 3 mock quizzes to prepare us for the actual certification exam.

The mock quizzes were purely multiple-choice, with 20 to 40 questions per quiz and a time limit of about 1 minute per question.

This might sound intimidating but if you pay attention during the course, you should be able to answer most of the questions quite easily.

Of course, there were some tricky questions which tripped many of us up. So after each quiz, XB went through these questions to help us understand how to reach the right answer.

Our class did pretty well for all 3 quizzes. According to XB, our class average was around 70% for the first quiz. And our scores only improved after that!

Google Ads Fundamentals certification exam

We took the Google Ads Fundamentals certification exam right at the end of the course, when everything was still fresh in our minds.

To pass the exam, you’ll need to answer 60 multiple-choice questions within 90 minutes, and score at least 80%.

I’m glad that we did the mock quizzes beforehand, because they really helped in reinforcing the concepts taught.

Thanks to all the advance preparation we did, I breezed through the exam quite easily, scoring a cool 93%. Woohoo!!

Here’s my cert:

Verdict on Equinet Academy’s Google Ads Fundamentals Course

Equinet Academy’s Google Ads Fundamentals course is excellent. I can’t really fault it for anything.

To me, the course’s main selling points are:

1. That it is taught by a competent and experienced Google Ads professional, and
2. Its hands-on approach to teaching Google Ads.

I really appreciated how we had many opportunities to try things out on our own, and then receive helpful feedback from XB on the spot.

In fact, I overheard one of my coursemates say they preferred taking courses at Equinet Academy instead of at another training provider (which shall remain unnamed), because of Equinet Academy’s more hands-on approach!

Before attending this course, I didn’t know the differences between search and display ads. And while I had tried using the Google Ads platform on my own, let’s just say it didn’t go too well.

But now, after going through Equinet Academy’s Google Ads Fundamentals course and getting my Google certification, I’m confident that I’ll be able to navigate the Google Ads platform and run my own Google Ads campaigns.

So if, in the future, you happen to see search ads for this blog in the Google search engine results pages, you’ll know which training provider I have to thank 😉

You can sign up for Equinet Academy’s Google Ads Fundamentals course here!

Or if Google Ads isn’t your thing, check out Equinet Academy’s other digital marketing courses here.

This post was brought to you in partnership with Equinet Academy.