Only the two hundred and thirty fourth member with this mighty title

Today I was invited to take the newly introduced GA IQ test and passed with a fairly reasonable 85% (You need 75% to be assured of the award). It tests you on a variety of the subjects covered at the so-called “Conversion University” and is actually pretty tricky. You can only take the test once and have about 90 minutes to scrabble around dredging your brain for answers. I became increasingly worried as I went through due to how hopeless I was being with the answers. This was made far worse by the onset of time passing by. I kept doing annoying mental calculations for how long I had for each question and due to some truly awful arithmetic it seemed like I had not long for each. In the end I had about 30 minutes to go over everything again and change a few things around.

I recommend heavily reviewing he conversion university material before taking the test and keep a few Google windows around for some of the more tricky areas. Notably around Regular Expressions. Its certainly a test of both your analytical ability and technical web concepts. Like with the driving theory test, I think this should be ideally backed up with a full practical test….maybe even in a car.

Its certainly a good idea on the whole since it gives at least a certain reassurance to Web Analytics customers that the consultant they have brought in is not completely rogue. Unfortunately knowledge of the tool and it’s implementation is nothing without a creative mind and perception of trends, insight and a love of motion charts. Maybe the practical test could be a group exercise where you have to work as a team to recreate a motion chart of page views over visits over bounce rate over goal conversion using large foam balls being thrown from a balcony manned by Google boffins.