Certified Google Ads Course Online: Master AI-Driven PPC & PMax

You should take the free certification — we prepare you for it and we’ve written a free guide to passing it. But look at what it measures. Each Skillshop assessment is 75 minutes of multiple choice, 80% to pass, retakeable the next day, and it expires after a year. Nothing in it requires you to have spent a single rupee of real money. You can hold a Google Ads certification and have never built an account, never written an ad that ran, and never watched a budget disappear into search terms you didn’t choose. This course is the other half: you build the account, launch the campaigns, spend the budget and answer for the result, with a practitioner reviewing your work each week.

Yes, for part of it. Three of the six assignments require a live advertising budget, paid directly to Google rather than to Digital Vidya, and you set the daily cap yourself. That’s deliberate: a campaign that has never spent money teaches you nothing about what happens when it does, and the difference between a learner who has watched their own budget leak and one who hasn’t is obvious to any interviewer. The other three assignments need no spend.

Both, as full modules rather than mentions. Performance Max gets its own module covering Asset Group structure, audience signals, brand exclusions and how to read performance when the channel breakdown is limited. AI Max for Search is covered in week one — Google began auto-upgrading eligible Search campaigns to it in September 2026 and is retiring Dynamic Search Ads from February 2027, so a course teaching the old setup would already be out of date. We also cover Demand Gen, which replaced Discovery campaigns and is absorbing standalone Display.

The course prepares you for the Google Skillshop assessments, and we provide mock exams for the Search, Display, Video and Shopping certifications. Each real assessment is 75 minutes, needs 80% to pass, and stays valid for one year.

It varies by industry, but 4:1 is the usual benchmark. What matters more is knowing how to move it — we teach you to work from the search terms report and negative keyword lists to cut the spend that was never going to convert, which is almost always the fastest available improvement.

Both, and the second is the one people underestimate. Most owners paying an agency can’t evaluate the report they receive. After four weeks you’ll know what a reasonable cost per conversion looks like for your category, whether your conversion tracking is actually recording the right thing, and which questions to ask when the numbers move. Several participants run the course on their own business and finish with the account already improved.

Ten modules across four weeks: how the auction works, account structure and match types, Search campaigns and AI Max, ad creative with Gemini, Demand Gen, YouTube, Shopping and Merchant Center, Performance Max, Smart Bidding, and privacy-first measurement in GA4. Full module list is in the syllabus section above.

Four weeks. Live sessions run Monday to Friday for two hours, in either an 11 AM–1 PM or 8–10 PM IST batch, plus six graded assignments totalling twelve hours and a capstone project.

Both, in sequence. Week one assumes no prior knowledge and starts from how the ad auction works. From week two it moves into Performance Max, Smart Bidding and conversion measurement, which is territory most working marketers haven’t covered properly.

The Digital Vidya Certified Search Engine Marketing certificate, included in the fee. The course also prepares you for the Google Ads Skillshop assessments, HubSpot and Vskills certifications. The Google and HubSpot exams are free to sit on the providers’ own platforms.

PPC Executive, Paid Search Analyst, Performance Marketing Executive and SEM Specialist are the usual entry points, moving into Performance Marketing Manager or agency account management. Digital Vidya provides placement assistance — resume and LinkedIn profiling, mock interviews, and introductions to hiring partners — not a placement guarantee, and the distinction matters. What actually gets you hired is being able to open your own account in an interview and explain your decisions, which is what the capstone is for.