We think the most important thing that should be known; is that the value of a PPC account to your company is right up there with the value of your website.

  • It’s company asset value.
  • It’s sales revenue growth value.

Your most senior chiefs need to have the highest level of ownership for the accounts and the ability to freeze people out, or the company auditors could mark it as a risk in the company’s financial accounting statements – and no one wants to be involved in a negligence story, eh?

Sound scary enough? Should be.

How to spot if you’re in danger:

If you’re:

  • A senior ranking director in the company.
  • A person responsible for marketing.

And if you answer NO to any of the following questions – then you need to take corrective action as soon as possible.

  • Do you know who has admin rights to your Google & Facebook accounts?
  • Do you know who has access to the company credit card on that account?
  • Do you know your company’s process for removing an employee from the accounts in the event of a dismissal?
  • Are you happy that the privileges and access rights relating to sensitive areas of your accounts have been checked in the last few weeks?

Why does it matter to you?

Google & Facebook consider the person with the highest privileges to be the account owner? Period*.

*They prefer to leave any ownership arguments between you, and the contract that any offending party agreed to; settled in accordance with your country’s contractual laws.

Disgruntled employees cause havoc when they leave.

…and they are hard to spot. You hired them because you thought they might be great, remember?

Check out this article when things went badly wrong for HMV with a disgruntled employee.

You might not have a spend cap set up on your account (or on your credit card).

Google & Facebook’s sign up terms state that you are entirely responsible for your spend control. They will not, under any circumstances refund anything that you tell them you didn’t mean to spend – even if it was a malicious employee, or a total mistake. That sucks, right?

Do you need to sit down?

Now read this: 3 ways to avoid losing your account, your money and your pride in a PPC crisis.