Google Ads Account Ownership – Who Have Access To Your Account?

Who’s The Owner of The Ad Account? Google Ads access levels

Every single time you grant access to your Google Ads Account to another user (e.g. an advertising agency), you can choose the appropriate permission level to specify the features and elements that can be viewed and edited.

Remember: if you accept an invitation to link your account with someone else’s manager account and grant full administrative access, that user will have full access to your account and will be able to change the access level of other users and – in some cases – even remove someone’s access. In other words you make this person a full Google Ads administrative owner. That is why it’s so important to entrust the account to a specialist or PPC agency whom you can fully trust.

Google Ads Account Ownership – How to grant and remove access to a Google Ads Account?

In order to grant access for specific e-mail address (e.g. your employee’s one) you need to:

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account,
2. Click the Tools (botton in the top right corner),
3. From the Setup menu select Account access,
4. Click on the plus (+) Icon,
5. Select the desiredaccess level, then type the e-mail adddress of the user who will be granted access to your account,
6. Click send invitation.

Once the invitation has been accepted, you’ll be sent a notification. If you want to cancel the pending invitation, click REMOVE ACCESS in the Actions column.

Google Ads Account Ownership – How to accept an access request to a Google Ads Account?

If you’re granting access to an agency, the most convenient method is to send the agency your account’s ID and then the agency will send an access request. In order to accept it, you need to:

1. Click Tools,
2. From the Setup menu select Account access
3. Go to Managers tab
4. Click Accept

Google Ads Account Ownership – How to grant access to Google Ads billings and payments?

You can decide which users can undertake such actions as payments, change of payment method, or invoice generation by adding or removing their Google Payments profile in the Google Payments Center. More information on that subject can be found here:

https://support.google.com/paymentscenter/answer/7162853?visit_id=636868713577890108-801300073&rd=1

Why does the agency need administrative access to your account?

The agency operates various tools, which are linked to your account during the cooperation time. For this purpose, it’s often necessary to grant access to your Google Ads account for an e-mail address combined with that specific tool (a simple example of such practice is linking a Google Analytics account to a Google Ads account). Thanks to the fact that the agency has administrative access to the account, the work process on that account is much more convenient and faster.

Expert Comment

It’s extremely important to pay attention to who’s your administrative owner of tools like Google Ads or Analytics. In all leading SEO Agencies clients’ are in control of all accounts which guarantees them that no data will stay with the agency in case of the end of cooperation. So, when the agency creates accounts for you, make sure that you’re granted all the permissions account and you’re the owner of the data. Otherwise, you may have a problem with getting confidential information back, so remember – always make the matter clear at the beginning of cooperation.

Matt Calik

Head of SEO & SEM

What level of access to the account should the client have during cooperation with the agency?

You may not have full knowledge about Google Ads and this may be one of the reasons why you decided to hire an agency or an employee to manage your Google Ads account on your behalf. But under no circumstances can you allow the situation that you don’t have complete access to your account. Simply put, that would mean you need to have 100% trust that the agency manages the account in the right way.

The client should always have easy access to all the information about running a campaign. At Delante we do not just give account permissions, but we also create interactive reports that allow quick and easy insight into a campaign and its effects.

From the client’s point of view, the best you can do is to retain ownership of your Google Ads account (administrative access) and grant access to the agency. However, you need to keep in mind that some elements are part of an agency’s know-how. This is why agencies often decide to grant the client a standard access level during the cooperation time.

Agencies that professionally run Google Ads campaigns certainly have extensive knowledge about advertising and also various tools for site analysis and trends at hand. But they don’t always know your business as well as you do. That’s why the cooperation between the agency and the client is so important. There are numerous examples of situations when the client proposed better keywords, helped to understand his business better or was even the author of the best performing ads. Therefore the best thing you can do is to guarantee at least ‘read-only’ access, and then if some doubts about what’s happening on your account occur, you will be able to point them out to the agency. Together it’s much easier to achieve the desired results.

Why you should be a Google Ads administrative account owner after the end of cooperation?

If your account is currently managed by an agency or hired specialist, it’s worth asking who the account owner is after finishing the cooperation. Some agencies believe that the client shouldn’t be granted access to the account, while others consider the account as the client’s belonging. As an SEM agency, we’re strongly inclined towards the client. Months or even years invested in advertising provide key data of great value and it is the client who should receive full access to them upon the termination of cooperation. Even a badly managed account can provide information on what worked or not and which campaigns and keywords have the most potential. That’s why we support the approach that every Google Ads account ownership should be transferred to the client.

There are cases of unfair and illegal practices by advertising agencies. For instance, an unaware customer pays money, which instead of being credited to his Google Ads account, is consumed by the company he hired. Most often, Google Ads and Google Analytics are not connected to each other; therefore the client doesn’t have an insight into the campaign. Another cause is a lack of administrative access to the account and problems while transferring access rights to the news agency. This is not an out-of-the-ordinary situation and in most cases, we decide to set up a new account.

A similar thing is with granting access to Google Merchant Center, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager and here we’ll also be at the client’s side. In our agency, after finishing cooperation, the client gets full access to all tools. So, if you plan to start working with another agency, it’s worth asking how the issue of access after the termination of the contract looks like.

What if I don’t have access to my Google Ads account?

If you don’t have any access to your account, it’s worth reaching out first to the person who was in charge of your Google Ads campaigns most recently and has administrative access. Even if he or she doesn’t remember the password, it can be easily recovered. However, if it’s impossible for some reasons (e.g. the previous agency refuses to grant access to either the client or the new agency) there’s no problem to create a new Google Ads account – although it will result in the loss of data and the previous account’s history.

Google Ads Account Ownership – Summary

At the beginning of a cooperation with a new agency or specialist, it’s worth securing access to the Google Ads account – on a basic level during the cooperation time and a full administrative level after the termination of the contract. We believe in the transparency of activities of the majority of agencies and their pro-client approach. But if you’re uncertain about the quality of your campaign, the reliability of the agency you work with or you simply run it by yourself and want to check what can possibly be improved – contact us.