Every course page in Cairo carries the same sentence in some form. Ten years of experience. Millions in ad spend managed. Trained hundreds of students. None of it is checkable from the page you are reading it on, and none of it is a lie you could prove either.
That is the actual problem with choosing an instructor. Not dishonesty, but unfalsifiability. So the useful question is narrower than "is this person good": it is which of their claims can be verified by you, from outside, before you pay. There are more of those than most people realise, and the verifiable ones are not the ones usually advertised.
Certifications belong to people, not to schools
Start with the cleanest check available, because it is the one most often blurred. Google's own help page on certifications states plainly that individuals can earn Google Ads certifications, while a company earns Google Partner or Premier Partner status through a separate programme.
So a training centre that says "we are certified" is using the word loosely. A centre cannot hold a Google Ads certification. A person can. When you ask about certification, you are asking about the human who will be in the room, and the answer should be a name.
The same page gives the mechanics, and they are worth knowing because they set the ceiling on what the credential proves:
- A pass needs a score of 80 per cent or greater on the assessment.
- You get 75 minutes, and the timer cannot be paused once it starts.
- Fail it and you can retake it one day later.
- The certification stays valid for one year, and renewal means retaking and passing the assessment in that product area again.
Read that list as a buyer. A current certification proves someone sat a 75 minute assessment within the last twelve months and scored at least 80 per cent. That is real information. It is also the whole of what it proves, which matters for the section below.
What a Google Partner badge actually requires
This is the check almost nobody runs, and it is the most informative one, because the badge has published numeric thresholds. Google's Partner programme requirements list three:
- Performance. The registered Google Partners Ads manager account needs a minimum optimisation score of 70 per cent, and the requirement is checked daily.
- Spend. The account must hold 10,000 US dollars of ad spend across managed accounts over 90 days.
- Certification. A minimum of 50 per cent of account strategists must be certified in Google Ads, with the count capped at 100 users. The account also needs at least one certification in each product area where campaign spend is 500 US dollars or more over 90 days.
And Google's page on the programme adds the sentence that does the most work: a company does not become a Google Partner simply by joining the programme.
Here is why this is useful to a student rather than to an agency. A Partner badge is evidence that somebody at that organisation is currently running real accounts at a real spend level, because the badge cannot exist without the 90 day spend. It tells you nothing about teaching. But it does separate a centre with live accounts from a centre with only a curriculum, and that distinction is otherwise very hard to see from outside.
Which certifications even count
The same Partners page names the qualifying ones: Search, Display, Video, Shopping ads and Apps. It also says explicitly that Google Ads Professional certifications do not count toward the requirement, and no others do.
This matters because certification screenshots are easy to collect and hard to read. Someone may hold several Google badges that are genuine and still hold none of the five that the Partner programme recognises. If an instructor is teaching paid search, the certification you want named is Search, and the year it was taken.
Platform certificates also sit in a wider argument about whether any of this signals competence, which we have looked at from the employer's side in whether employers care about marketing certificates.
Four questions that have verifiable answers
Ask these by email, before you visit. The point is not the answer itself, it is that each one can be checked afterwards.
- Who teaches the full course, and which certifications do they currently hold, by name and year? A name plus a product area plus a date is checkable. "Our team is certified" is not.
- Is the centre a Google Partner, and under which account? If yes, the thresholds above are being met by somebody. If no, that is not disqualifying, but then ask the next question harder.
- What accounts has the instructor run in the last twelve months, and at roughly what monthly spend? You are not entitled to client names. You are entitled to a category and an order of magnitude, and a practitioner can give both in one sentence.
- Will the person teaching the trial session teach the full course? The answer is sometimes no, and it changes the meaning of everything you saw in the trial. We wrote about that specific trap in what a trial class can and cannot prove.
What none of this tells you
Be clear about the gap, because it is wide. Every check above measures practice, and none of them measures teaching.
A certification is a 75 minute assessment. A Partner badge is a spend and performance threshold. Neither has any component that tests whether a person can explain an idea to someone who does not already understand it, sequence a syllabus, or notice that half the room is lost. Those are separate skills, and practitioners who are excellent at the work are frequently poor at teaching it, because the thing they are best at has become invisible to them.
Which means the verification above narrows the field rather than picking the winner. It removes the centre that cannot name a teacher, cannot name a certification, and cannot describe a live account. What remains still has to be judged in a room, by watching one teach.
Khaled Badr argues a sharper version of the limit, that the work talks and the certificate mostly does not, in are marketing certificates worth it, and it is worth reading against this article rather than alongside it.
Warning signs that are easy to miss
- Certifications shown as logos with no names and no dates. A wall of badges on a landing page attaches to nobody. Certifications attach to people and expire after a year.
- "Certified by Google" used about the centre. Per Google's own wording, centres get Partner status, individuals get certifications. The phrasing tells you how carefully the rest of the page was written.
- Experience described only in totals. Millions managed, hundreds trained. Totals never shrink and cannot be checked. A current monthly figure can be.
- No answer to who teaches week nine. The founder teaching the first session and an assistant teaching the rest is a common and perfectly legal arrangement, and you should know about it in advance.
- Pressure to pay before you have a name. A discount expiring tonight is a sales mechanic, and more of them are covered in red flags in marketing course advertising in Egypt.
Our own position, including the part that costs us
We teach in Cairo, so treat this section as interested rather than neutral.
We will give you the name of the person teaching your cohort and the certifications they hold with the year, by email, before you pay. We think any centre should, and a centre that will not is telling you something.
The part that costs us: we are not going to argue that credentials should decide this. They are a filter, not a verdict, and if you run the four questions above on us and on two competitors, you may well find all three pass. At that point the honest advice is to go and watch each one teach, and then choose on the teaching, which is the only part none of these checks can reach. If one of those rooms is better than ours, take it. The outcome you are buying is not the badge on the wall, it is whether you can run an account in week twelve, and whether you touch a live client project predicts that far better than any certificate does.