Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, has confirmed that a Google ad representative, a Google employee, has made unauthorized changes to a Google ad account. Marvin wrote that following up after an investigation on the matter, "we did not properly follow our processes for ensuring approvals are granted before making changes."
This comes a couple of weeks after Andy Youngs, Co-Founder at The PPC People & Creative Lead at Website Design Ltd, posted about noticing unauthorized changes to their ad accounts. Andy wrote on LinkedIn:
We’ve just had a Google Rep actively make changes to a client account, without authorisation from us or the client.The changes they made (including writing new ad copy, adjusting headline pinning and changing a bidding strategy) don’t even show in the account change history.
Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, then confirmed the issue yesterday, she wrote:
Hi Andy, Following up here to confirm that we have investigated this and found we did not properly follow our processes for ensuring approvals are granted before making changes. I can also confirm this was a mistake and not intentional. That said, we take these issues very seriously and are taking steps to address them.
In short, she said this was "a mistake and not intentional." But she did confirm that Google "did not properly follow our processes for ensuring approvals are granted before making changes." She did promise they will take steps to address this going forward.
Andy replied to Ginny saying:
Thank you for the response. We have also received contact from the rep who made the changes. I appreciate you investigating this matter for us!It is a positive result for the wider community, as there was certainly some concern and I am sure people will be glad to hear that this was a one-off mistake rather than any new process.
This seems super concerning that you might not even notice changes that Google may make to your account unless you are super on top of every tiny detail, for all your campaigns and client campaigns.
Here is a screenshot of this from LinkedIn:
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
