Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Multiple Adwords and Gmail accounts - finally resolved (for me)

I've had this issue as long as I can remember - Adwords and Google accounts collide. If you are an intense user of both, you know what I'm talking about.

It is a great mystery why Google invests so much money in developing magnificent products that generate 0 revenue, and the one product that brings in all of its revenue - adWords - remains a step child. It is the only product that works really badly with the whole Google single-signon system. To take just one small example - the password strength requirement is different in AdWords. AdWords requires a stronger password, so if you attempt to sign up for a new Adwords account, your good ol' password from your Google account may not be strong enough.

Anyways, that's enough whining for one post. The reason I'm writing it is to explain how I finally got all my logins lined up without getting thrown from one account to another unexpectedly or getting logged out in the middle of writing an email.

First, the problem:
My problem was simple (turns out) - if you log in to a Google account (gmail, calendar, whatever...), and this same account has an Adwords account associated with it, you are automatically logged in to your Adwords account, even if you were already logged in as another user to your Adwords. As you find out about it, and sign out from AdWords, then sign back in with the AdWords account you wanted to be logged in with, you later realize that you were signed out of your email account as well. This cat and mouse game can continue forever.

Why is that?
If you're like me, your first adwords account was your gmail address. Then you got to manage one or two account more. Then maybe you thought you'd want to use the My Client Center to manage multiple account.
When you signed up to the MCC, you were told that your gmail address cannot be used as login for the My Client Center. So you created a new account. Then you added all the other accounts you were accessing individually into your MCC account. Great. It all works.

Now you went back to your gmail, and found out you were logged out from it when you clicked the "sign out" link on AdWords, so you log back in, read some emails, etc.
Then you go back to your AdWords MCC account, only to find out that you have been logged in to the original gmail AdWords account and out of the MCC account. If you log out from the Adwords account now, it will log you out from gmail.

Darn it.

Here's the solution:
You cannot have your gmail account as an Adwords account if you are using multiple AdWords account. What you need to do is this:

1) Log in to your AdWords account with your main gmail account.

2) Go to My Account->Access, and invite yourself to be an admin of the AdWords account, using some other email that you have (Gmail or other).

3) Accept the invitation, confirm yourself (this requires some logging in and out, back and forth - very annoying, but it's for a good cause and you won't have to do it again once you're done).
Important: As you sign up for the new AdWords access, remember the credentials you're using.

4) Log in to your original AdWords account using the new login you've created in steps 2-3. Then remove access to the original gmail account.

5) What just happened is that your gmail account just lost its Adwords privileges (you can still access the same account with the new login you created in steps 2-3). This means that when you log in to your gmail next time, it's not going to log you out from whatever Adwords account you were logged into. And vice-versa - when you log in to any adwords account, including MCC, you will not be logged out of your gmail.

Problem solved.

Optionally - you can now change your MCC account to use your main Gmail account, but I haven't tried it myself, so if you do, and you like, let me know.

Good luck. Be happy to help with more answer if I can (comment, and I will responde)

1 comment:

Doron Cahansky said...

Interesting, I did linked my main Gmail account to the MCC - it is indeed the easiest way to manage multiple accounts so give it a try.