Jaimie Dobson Internet Consultant

Now before you start getting too excited by reaching for your gun expecting a capture reward after having read that headline, there’s no need to panic!

Nothing illegal went on here, however technically, I did hijack a Google Adwords™ account and take it away from its top level Administrator and give it back to its rightful owner, in this case a client of ours.

Let me explain.

We’re working with an online retailer who spends a significant amount of money on PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising with Google Adwords each month. Too much in my opinion, but that’s what I hope to address with them.

Over the last few years the client had delegated the management of their Google Adwords account to a third-party PPC agency who it seems were not delivering the results that were expected. As a consequence, the relationship between the client and the agency had soured and the client wanted to part-company with them. Understandable!

Easy enough you may think! Simply block the PPC agency from accessing their Adword account and hey presto! Job done! However things are never as simple as they seem. Here’s why.

For a start, the client didn’t have the all important “Administrative Access” to their own Adwords account. Bizarre as this may sound; the PPC agency had given themselves Administrative Access to the client’s account but not the client themselves. This meant the client couldn’t go in and amend important details or control who had access to the account and or even their own PPC spend. A possible security issue if nothing else, as the client’s bank account and credit card details were available to anyone with Administrative Access.

So without this all important access level, there was a risk when the client terminated their relationship with the PPC agency; that they would take umbrage and shut the account down. This would result in the loss of the all important PPC keywords and adverts, both of which numbered in the hundreds.

The risk of this couldn’t be taken as it would mean spending hundreds of hours re-establishing their PPC account to its former status.

So having gained written permission form the Adwords account holder, our client, I went about seeking a way in which I could gain access to their Google Adwords account as an Administrator which would in turn allow me to grant admin access to the client themselves whilst also deleting other unwanted Users.

How I did this was relatively simple, but it did depend upon the client having control of their own domains name which luckily they did.

Under the client’s Google Account were two email accounts with Administrative Access, namely;

• An email address under the client’s domain “ppc@clientsdomain.com” (obviously a generic example is given here)which was used and accessed by the agency and…
• An independent email address owned and managed by the PPC agency.

The second email account I couldn’t do anything about, but as for the first here’s what I did to gain access to the client’s Google Account.

1. First of all I got the client transfer their domain name to us on our web servers.
2. Once migrated I mirrored the email account “ppc@clientsdomain.com”
3. I then went to the Password recovery page for Google Adwords account holders at https://www.google.com/accounts/ForgotPasswd and entered the email “ppc@clientsdomain.com”
4. I then checked email that had been sent to ppc@clientsdomain.com using a web mail interface on our server and followed the instructions to reset the account password, given to me in Google’s mail.
5. Once I’d reset the password to something that I wanted, I logged into the clients Adwords account as an Administrator which allowed me to delete Users that belonged to the agency. From now on they couldn’t access the client’s account using either their own email address or the one based on the client’s domain.

Simple really! All legal and above board and done with the Adwords account holders permission.

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Tags: Clients, E-Commerce, Google Tools