Caution when allowing access to Adwords

Posted on July 24, 2007 by Dave J.

I’ll save you the long story about why, but I had granted someone access to my Adwords Account. Then I deleted their access account. Easy enough, right?

Nope. I was mystified when I found some changes made that I didn’t do. Some digging around and I found out they were continuing to gain access via API. (API allows the use of other master accounts or external applications.)

Turns out when I created their account, the API access was actually a different ‘account’ listed under a different section of the Adwords site.

My experience to your future benefit, I hope.

(Those of you familiar with Adwords campaigns may have a guess as to what I was up to. Hopefully I can share the details later.)

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  • Adam

    Thanks for the heads up. Does this include third party PPC tracking/optimization services? It makes me more wary to trails in the future. I would have thought Google would had more things in place to protect users, especially since privacy seems to be such a popular topic lately.

  • Adam

    Thanks for the heads up. Does this include third party PPC tracking/optimization services? It makes me more wary to trails in the future. I would have thought Google would had more things in place to protect users, especially since privacy seems to be such a popular topic lately.

  • Dave J.

    Adam, you’re catching on.

  • Dave J.

    Adam, you’re catching on.

  • ign

    Interesting that you noticed that. Google sometimes is tricky with login access, many allow different kind of accesses and wrights.But here come other question: Why this company/person made changes afterwords without telling you? Adwords can be a dangerous spending machine when is bad configured. And the API access is more or less only used by massive adwords players.To check every minimal change, exists a tool that keep record of every movement during 3 months.Where:Campaign Management > tools >My Change History I hope it helps

  • ign

    Interesting that you noticed that. Google sometimes is tricky with login access, many allow different kind of accesses and wrights.But here come other question: Why this company/person made changes afterwords without telling you? Adwords can be a dangerous spending machine when is bad configured. And the API access is more or less only used by massive adwords players.To check every minimal change, exists a tool that keep record of every movement during 3 months.Where:Campaign Management > tools >My Change History I hope it helps

  • ign

    wrights = rights … :-P

  • ign

    wrights = rights … :-P

  • Dave J.

    Thanks ign, I’ll go look at that report.

  • Dave J.

    Thanks ign, I’ll go look at that report.