How to Safely Share Access to Your Google Adwords Account

If you’ve ever been involved in a Google Adwords campaign, you know there’s a LOT of moving pieces to keep track of to ensure a successful campaign.

From keywords, to geographic targeting, to monitoring campaign performance and making needed adjustments to your ad placements, bids, keywords, ads, ad text, etc. – it can be a lot for one person to handle (you know, in addition to all that work you do for your ACTUAL business).

So, you might need some help.

Whether this is someone who can help you design the best campaign for your budget, or just a virtual assistant who can help implement the changes you’ve already decided to make to your campaign, some help in managing your campaign can do a lot to keeping both your Adwords campaign and your business running at their best levels.

Okay, so you’ve decided you need some help. Which probably means this person needs stand-alone access to your account – how do you do that securely? how do you keep track of what changes they’ve made to your account instead of relying on just what they’ve told you? how do you un-share your account if you’ve decided to stop working with them?

The nice thing is – you can do all of these things, and you can do it pretty easily. Let’s walk through it:

How To Share Your Adwords Account

The pre-step to sharing your Adwords account is that your new user will need a Google address to access Adwords. You can send it to a non-Google address though; they’ll just be prompted to sign up for a free Google account if they don’t already have one or sign in with an existing one.

1. Head to your My Account tab in your account.
2. Select Account Access
3. Click Invite Other Users
4. Enter the email address you’d like to invite as well as a nickname
5. Choose an access level (see more on the below) and click send invitation
6. Almost done – once the person accepts the invitation, you’ll have to confirm the access. (Google will send you an email. You’ll simply click the link to log in and select “Grant Access” under Pending Invitations)

What access do they have now? Depending on what level of access you selected, your newly added user will have access to different things – from emails-only to the authority to add users of their own. If you’re looking for actual help in making changes to your campaigns, you’ll want to select at least standard-level access. Google runs through the details of the various access levels here.

Note: The REAL first step here is to make sure you BACK UP any data or campaigns you’ve already created if this isn’t your first campaign. Google takes you through that simple process here. Better safe than sorry, right?

How To Keep Track of What Changes Your Assistant or Consultant Makes

Instead of relying on your new user to report on what changes they’ve made to the account (which you can still request as a helpful step), you can rest easy knowing that Adwords is tracking all the changes to your account and who made them in the Change Log.

How do you view that report? After you log in to your account, head over to the Tools & Analysis tab and select “Change history.” You’ll get a very detailed report of what’s been changed, by whom, and at what level. It’s fairly simple to navigate, but if you want a guided tour – Google walks you through the deep detail you can access with this report here.

How to Un-Share Your Adwords Account

Revoking access from another user to your Adwords account should be done at the end of any engagement. Don’t worry – you can re-share access at any time. I like this move as a best practice because it allows you to manage your account without that previous user getting notices about what’s going on with the performance or other items with your campaigns.

Here’s how to do that:

1. Once logged in, head to your My Account tab
2. Select Account Access
3. Find the email address you’d like to remove under the “Users with account access” section
4. Click Actions – Terminate Access

Done! You’re back to riding solo with your Google Adwords account

Your Turn

Have you ever shared access to an Adwords account in the past? Did I miss anything? Curious about any other piece of the process? Did you find this useful? Let me know in the comments!

photo credit: TMAB2003 via photo pin cc