You are an Google AdWords professional that sets up campaigns and manages those search ad campaigns for your clients. This is a pretty big business these days. But what if your client doesn't pay you for your work? You stop maintaining his account, right?
Yea, I know, you spent all that time setting up the campaigns, doing all the keyword research, testing various ad types and such. You spent countless hours, never to be repaid. But at least the client won't get this hard earned work, since it is under your account, right?
Wrong!
A Google AdWords Help thread has one report of Google confirming that they will often transfer the account to the client, if the client is the one who holds the payment information (credit card) in the account. So in this case, not only did the client get away without paying this AdWords consultant, they also took all the work by the consultant.
The consultant wrote in the thread:
I was hired by a business to do marketing for them so I decided to run a Google AdWords campaign and set it up under my Google account. I had a dispute with them and they then demanded that I hand over this AdWords account to them even though I set it up under my Google account name and that I had spent many hours beyond what they paid me to develop an effective strategy and had information was proprietary to how I marketed this business.I just got an email stating that Google handed the AdWords account over to them. What are the rules that allow this to happen without Google contacting me first?
AdWordsPro Sarah, an official Google rep, responded:
Im not sure exactly what the rules and regulations are on this because it doesn't happen often. That said, if you were using your client's billing information in the account, we will almost always side with them. As long as they are paying for the clicks, we need to make sure they are protected.
Lesson learned? Protect yourself with contracts and other means before doing all that work.
Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.
