Google Ads account management for SA marketers

You’re handing your Google Ads account to a new agency. What do you give them, what do you keep, and how do you revoke when the relationship ends?

This is the question most SA SMB owners get wrong on day one. Granting the wrong access level lets an agency lock you out of your own account. Forgetting to revoke access when the contract ends leaves three or four old users with the ability to change your live campaigns months later. Neither problem shows up in your daily reports — both show up at the worst possible time.

The rest of this article covers the five access levels Google Ads offers, the right level for each kind of collaborator, how to add and remove users cleanly, and the related but separate operation of excluding underperforming landing pages from your campaigns.

The five access levels

Every Google Ads account user sits at one of five access levels (Google Ads access docs):

Admin — full control. Can create campaigns, change billing, see all data, AND invite or remove other users. This is the highest tier. Only one person needs it: the business owner, or the person legally accountable for the account.

Standard — campaign work. Can create, edit, and pause campaigns. Can view all reports. Can change bids, budgets, ad copy, landing pages. CANNOT invite, remove, or change other users. This is the right level for any external agency, freelancer, or in-house marketer.

Read-only — view only. Can see every report and every setting. Cannot change anything. Useful for stakeholders who want visibility without the risk — your accountant, your financial director, a co-founder who wants to watch the numbers.

Billing — payment management. Can update the payment method, change billing details, view invoices. Cannot touch campaigns. The right level for the person who handles the card on file — usually the owner or the bookkeeper.

Email-only — receives notifications and reports. No login access. Useful when you want a third party to see automated reports without being able to log into the account at all.

How to add an agency to your account

The mistake to avoid: granting Admin to your agency.

Admin means the agency can invite and remove other users — including you. If the relationship sours, an Admin-level agency can technically lock you out of your own Google Ads account, requiring a formal Google support escalation to recover. We’ve seen this happen twice in SA SMB accounts in the last three years. The recovery takes 4–8 weeks of back-and-forth with Google support, and during that time your campaigns sit unmanaged.

Standard access is the right level for every external collaborator. It gives them all the campaign-work permissions they need to do their job, and zero permissions to lock you out.

The flow to add a user, step by step:

1. Sign into your Google Ads account as the Admin user (you).
2. Click the Tools icon (the spanner, top right).
3. Under “Setup” select Access and security.
4. Click the blue + icon to add a new user.
5. Type the email address for the person you’re inviting. This must be the Google account email they sign into Google with — usually their work email if their company uses Google Workspace, otherwise a personal Gmail.
6. Select Standard from the access-level dropdown.
7. Click Send invitation.

The invitee gets an email. They accept it, and they’re in. You can see them under Access and security with their access level and the date they joined.

If you have multiple Google Ads accounts — say one for each business line — and you want to give the same person access to all of them, the cleanest approach is for the agency to set up their own Manager (MCC) account and request access to each of your accounts. Each of your accounts grants Standard access to their MCC, and they manage all the accounts from one login. Your accounts stay separate; their access is auditable in one place.

How to remove access (and what happens to the work)

When an agency relationship ends, removing their access takes two minutes. The campaigns they built stay in your account — Google Ads doesn’t tie campaign ownership to user access. Only the agency’s ability to log in and change things goes away.

The flow:

1. Sign in as Admin.
2. Tools → Access and security.
3. Find the user in the list.
4. Click the three-dot menu next to their email.
5. Select Remove access.
6. Confirm.

That’s it. Their login no longer works. Their campaigns continue running exactly as configured until you change them yourself.

Before you click Remove, check three things:

• Active campaigns. Pause anything you don’t want to continue running with the old setup. The agency’s bid strategies and budgets stay in place after they leave.
• Scheduled changes. Some agencies queue up future bid adjustments or ad-copy rotations. Tools → History will show recent and scheduled changes. Cancel anything you don’t want to inherit.
• Linked accounts. If the agency linked their MCC to your account or linked external tools (call tracking, third-party reporting), check Linked accounts under Tools → Setup → Linked accounts and remove anything you don’t want to keep paying for.

The most common SA SMB oversight: forgetting to revoke access when an agency change happens informally. The contract ends, the agency stops sending reports, you move on. Six months later the old agency’s senior strategist is still listed in your account, technically able to make changes. They almost certainly won’t. But “almost certainly” isn’t audit-grade.

Run an access audit every quarter. Tools → Access and security → look at who’s listed. If someone hasn’t logged in for 90+ days and you don’t remember why they have access, remove them. You can always add them back if it turns out they need it.

Excluding landing pages from campaigns

This is a separate operation from user access, but it’s the one anchoring search query that brought a lot of SA SMBs to this topic. So worth covering.

You exclude a landing page when one specific URL on your site is converting poorly compared to others in the same campaign. Google’s algorithm may be sending traffic to that URL because it ranks high on Quality Score — but if the page doesn’t convert at the right rate, you’re wasting budget on it.

The fix is to stop ads from sending traffic to that URL while keeping the rest of the campaign running. In a Search campaign, you don’t directly exclude a landing page — you exclude the keywords or ad groups that point to it, or you remove the URL from your ad group’s final URLs.

The cleaner flow if the URL is set at the ad-group level:

1. Open the Search campaign.
2. Navigate to Ads & assets → Ads.
3. Find the ads whose Final URL is the page you want to exclude.
4. Pause those ads.
5. Create new ads pointing to the better-converting URL in their place.

If the URL is set at the campaign level (via Final URL expansion in Performance Max or Smart campaigns), you need to add it to URL exclusions:

1. Open the campaign → Settings.
2. Scroll to URL expansion (Performance Max only).
3. Add the underperforming URL to “URLs to exclude.”
4. Save.

A typical SA SMB scenario: you’ve got a service business with five service pages. The “burst geyser repair” page converts at 8%. The “general plumbing” page converts at 1.2%. Both are eligible for clicks in your Search campaign. You exclude the general plumbing URL by removing it from your ad group’s Final URLs and rewriting the ad copy to point everything at the burst-geyser page. The clicks now go to the page that converts.

This is a quarterly-audit job, not a daily one. Once a quarter, pull a conversion-by-landing-page report (Reports → Predefined reports → Landing pages), spot the underperformers, and exclude them.

Common mistakes

Granting Admin to an agency. Standard does everything an agency needs. Admin gives them the power to lock you out. The first question any SA SMB owner should ask a new agency: “Are you fine with Standard access, or do you need Admin and why?” If they insist on Admin without a credible reason — like, they’re a senior-tier agency that handles the entire account including user management on your behalf — that’s a flag.

Forgetting to revoke when relationships end. Run a quarterly access audit. Anyone who hasn’t logged in for 90+ days that you don’t actively manage gets removed.

Sharing a single Google account login across multiple people. This breaks audit trails, makes it impossible to know who changed what, and violates Google’s terms of service. Every person who needs access gets their own user invitation at the appropriate access level.

What to do next

Three things to do this week:

1. Audit your current access list. Open Tools → Access and security. Note who’s there. Remove anyone you don’t recognise or don’t actively need. If you can’t tell who someone is, ask. Don’t remove blindly — you might lock out your own bookkeeper.

2. Check that you (the owner) are listed as Admin. If your agency set up the account originally and you’re listed as Standard or Read-only while they’re Admin, you have a problem. Get the agency to grant you Admin before any other change. If they refuse, escalate to Google support.

3. Document the access list. Keep a simple text file or spreadsheet listing who has access to your Google Ads, what level, and why. Update it every time you add or remove a user. This isn’t bureaucracy — it’s the only audit trail you have if something goes wrong.

If managing this yourself feels off, NAM operates as your outsourced Google Ads team — you keep Admin, we work at Standard, and you get a quarterly access audit included as part of the engagement: book a free audit.

If something has already gone wrong — you’ve been locked out of your own account, or you can’t remove a former agency user — see Google Ads troubleshooting: suspended accounts and billing errors for the recovery flow.

---

Internal links (for WP publishing)

• → /google-ads-for-south-african-businesses/ | anchor: “Google Ads in South Africa” | placement: intro
• → /google-ads-troubleshooting/ | anchor: “Google Ads troubleshooting” | placement: what-to-do-next section

External links (for WP publishing)

• → https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9978556 | anchor: “Google Ads access docs” | rel: “noopener” | target: “_blank”
• → https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6372672 | anchor: “Google Ads add-user docs” | rel: “noopener” | target: “_blank”
• → https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7459700 | anchor: “Google Ads Manager (MCC) docs” | rel: “noopener” | target: “_blank”

Featured image

• Concept: Two laptops side by side: an SA SMB owner’s screen on the left showing a Google Ads access settings page, an agency consultant’s screen on the right showing the same account
• Alt text: Google Ads access settings screen on a laptop next to an agency consultant’s laptop
• Sourcing: Pexels search “two laptops office collaboration”; fallback AI-generated stub