It has barely been a year since Elevate Digital opened our doors, hearts and inboxes to small and large businesses from Hong Kong and all over the world. Even so, the consistent excellence of the services we provide has already become apparent enough for us to be recognized as a Google Partner.

If you don’t know much about the program, we’ll resist the temptation to try to present the Google Partner badge, that you can now see proudly flaunted in our footer, as a security pass that gives us access to Google’s secret labs. Instead we’ll do our best to explain what this actually says about our level of expertise and reliability, and how it helps our current and future clients.

What Does it Take to Qualify?

Simply doing a good job, in terms of having skilled, competent and active people in your team, and ensuring steady growth for both your clients and your agency.

Competent People

In order for an agency to be recognized as a Partner, it needs at least one employee with standard or admin access to the agency’s Google Ads manager or sub-manager accounts, who is Google Ads certified. To get certified, the agency employee has to have successfully completed the Google Ads Fundamentals assessment along with at least one of the specialized assessments. You’ll notice, if you hover over our badge, that we have two: Search Ads and Mobile Ads.

In other words, the badge confirms that we currently have at least one highly-qualified Ads expert who has been given the appropriate level of access to adequately monitor, modify or pause campaigns.

Being Active

Admittedly, degrees and certifications don’t mean much on their own, if the skills and knowledge they indicate are not honed in practice. That’s why, to become a Google Partner, an agency’s Google Ads manager account has to show a spend of at least $10,000 in the last 90 days. This sends a clear signal to Google that the agency has earned enough trust from its clients, and that it has enough of a turn-over to be an interesting partner.

Ensuring Steady Growth

Google likes to target agencies that are large enough for the Partner program, but they also need to know that they won’t be giving their endorsement to someone who is doing anything less than an exemplary job. That’s why, before making Elevate Digital a Google Partner, they needed to ensure that our agency had been recording steady improvements in terms of the number of advertisers working with us, the growth of our and their revenue, and in terms of client retention we had shown over an extensive period of time.    

 

What Does This Mean for our Clients?

Well, aside from the fact that Google has taken a long, hard look at our qualifications and performance, and deemed us reliable and productive enough, we also get some actual perks with our status, perks which can benefit our clients as well.

Apart from being able to participate in agency competitions and receive different promotional offers which we might be able to pass on to our clients, the most important benefits involve the increased level of access to Google support, trainings, events and updates when it comes to upcoming features and products.

This puts us ahead of the curve when compared to agencies which are not members of the program, not only because it allows us to expand our knowledge even more, but also because it gives us an insight into the future of digital marketing not all agencies can boast.

Since the program has recently changed, Google Partners are no longer eligible for dedicated account management, and partners search has been disabled, but most of the other benefits that used to come with the badge are still here.

 

What’s Next?

As far as we are concerned, not much has changed. While it is nice to get a recognition from the most relevant body in the industry, and to see that our commitment to quality, self-improvement and the prosperity of our clients is a matter of public record, we don’t intend to become complacent and deviate from the standards which brought us here in the first place.

We are still here for all our clients and for your every PPC or SEO related inquiry, still willing to talk for hours on end about the best way to promote your business, and still, whatever the badge might say, primarily consider ourselves a trusty and reliable partner to our customers first, and only then to Google.

If you wanted to give PPC a shot but couldn’t find anyone you would trust with your advertising budget, Elevate Digital is here for you, and as far as Google is concerned, we know what we are doing.