I’m no stranger to seeing Google suite and other products go down or turn up a good old 404 error like a novice website.
Today, I hit something different in AdWords (Errr, I mean Google Ads) while trying to create a campaign.
It’s not down, there are no messages appearing on the site, and the official Twitter account is quiet, but…
You think an error might have occurred? It only says so four times.
However, what went wrong?
I suspect this space is usually reserved for the explanation as to what went wrong, but instead all I’ve got today Google’s panic voice.
To make sure something really go wrong, I went back to check to see if I really made an error, but everything is copacetic.
To further test if something is up, I rebooted my com, signed in and out, changed computers and the same thing every time.
The real breakthrough came when a colleague who is also managing the account attempted to create a campaign…
And he was successful!
That narrowed it down to my account being the culprit.
From there, it was a quick check up user an administrator under Tools and Settings > Setup > Account Access.
It turns out someone had accidentally set my account permissions to “read-only” – meaning, I could review the data in Google Ads, but couldn’t make any changes.
Those types of permissions were only every used for clients, so it seems something went wrong when setting up a client account.
Of course, it would have been nice if Google Ads had been able to tell me this was the case. It could have saved 10 minutes of head-scratching and running around.
So the next time you get a bunch of weird, unexplained errors, review your account permissions.
