How do you add someone as an administrator in Google Tools?

TL;DR

• Never share your own login details with an agency or colleague. Instead, grant access using their own email address.
• Each Google tool has its own permissions menu: Analytics, Search Console, Google Ads, your Business Profile and Cloud Platform all work differently.
• Always assign the lowest role that allows the work to be carried out. For an external agency, ‘Editor in Analytics’ is usually sufficient: all settings are managed, but users cannot be added.
• Always retain ownership yourself. That is the difference between granting someone access and handing over the key to your business data.
• The person you add will need a Google account. This can also be a business email address; a Gmail address is not required.
• You can remove someone via the same menu. Review your permissions a few times a year and remove former employees and former agencies.
• Below is the exact click-through path for each tool, so you can sort it out in a quarter of an hour.

It’s a familiar situation. You want to outsource your online marketing, or a new employee needs to start working with your data. This means you have to grant someone access to your Google tools. Google has many different platforms, and each platform has its own menu for permissions. That makes it unnecessarily confusing.

Something we often see: clients forwarding their own login details. Please do not do this. You’re not just granting access to that one tool, but to your entire Google account, including your email. And you cannot revoke that access selectively without changing your password. It’s safer and easier to grant tool-specific access to the other person’s email address. That way, you remain in control.

Below, we’ll walk you through the five tools you’ll need most often as an entrepreneur.

How do you add a user in Google Analytics?

Log in and go to Settings (the cog icon at the bottom left). Select ‘Account access management’ if you want to give someone access to everything, or ‘Property access management’ for a single specific website. Click the blue plus sign, select ‘Add users’, enter the email address and select the role.

Analytics comprises six roles, and the distinction between them is more important than most people realise:

• Administrator. Full control, including adding and removing users. Keep this role for yourself.
• Editor. Manages all settings at property level, but cannot add users. This is usually the appropriate role for an external agency.
• Marketer. Can create and edit target audiences, events and key events, and import conversions into Google Ads.
• Analyst. Able to conduct and share exploratory research.
• Viewer. Can view settings and data and explore the system, but cannot make any changes.
• None. No role in this area.

So don’t automatically select “Administrator” just because it sounds easiest. An agency setting up your analytics needs “Editor”; a colleague who only views reports needs “Viewer”. Tick the box to send the user an email, and click “Add”.

Analytics is at the heart of your website data. Whenever we have a website built for a client, we always integrate this tool straight away and configure the key events.

How do you add a user in Google Search Console?

Go to Settings in the left-hand menu and select Users and permissions. Click on Add user, enter the email address and choose between Full and Limited. If you wish to make someone an owner, this cannot be done via this menu: you add a verified owner via Delegate ownership.

What the roles involve:

• Owner. Full control, including managing users and deleting the property.
• Full user. Can view all data and perform most actions, such as having a URL indexed or submitting a sitemap. This is usually sufficient for an external SEO provider.
• Limited user. Can view most data but cannot perform any actions.

Search Console is indispensable for your online visibility. Here, you can see which keywords you appear for, how often they’re clicked on, and whether Google is having problems indexing your pages. This is a standard part of our search engine optimisation work, and a full explanation of the tool can be found in our blog post on Google Search Console.

How do you add a user in Google Ads?

In your Google Ads account, go to Tools and settings, and under Settings, click on Access and security. You will then see all current users. Click on the blue plus button, enter the email address of the person or agency, and select the access level.

The levels you can choose from:

• Managed. Full access, including users and invoicing.
• Standard. Allows you to create and edit campaigns, amend budgets and view reports. This is the level of access an agency needs to do its job.
• Read-only access. Can view everything, but cannot make any changes.
• Email only. Receives reports, has no access to the account.
• Invoicing. Access is limited to invoices and payment settings only.

One thing is particularly important here: ensure the account is in your name and remains linked to your email address. Never let an agency set up the account in their own name, because then your ad history and conversion data won’t automatically belong to you if you switch agencies. That’s a common mistake that only becomes a problem when you want to switch.

You can find out more about the platform itself in our blog on Google Ads, and view our work under ‘Projects’.

How do you add an administrator to your Google Business Profile?

Search for your own company name on Google whilst logged in with the account that manages the profile. In the admin panel, click on the three dots and select ‘Company Profile Settings’. Go to ‘People and Access ’ and click ‘Add ’ to enter an email address.

You can choose between two roles:

• Owner. Full control. Can manage other users and delete the profile.
• Administrator. Can update the profile: add photos, adjust opening hours, respond to reviews and post messages. Cannot delete the profile or manage owners.

For external parties, ‘Beheerder’ is the right choice. This allows an agency to do everything necessary without your profile being at risk of disappearing.

Your Business Profile forms the basis of your local visibility: it largely determines whether you appear in the map section. Google cites three factors for this: relevance, distance and popularity. A complete and up-to-date profile has a direct impact on the first two of these. Read more about this in our blog on local SEO.

How do you grant access to Google Cloud Platform?

Go to the Google Cloud Console and select the correct project from the bar at the top. In the left-hand menu, go to IAM and Managed Services and click on IAM. Click on ‘Grant access’ at the top, enter the Google account and assign a role.

GCP works differently from other tools: there are hundreds of highly specific roles rather than just a handful. This takes a bit of searching, but that’s the intention. The principle is known as ‘least privilege’: only grant someone access to the part they are working on. A developer who only manages servers does not need access to your billing or your storage buckets.

Please do take your time with this. An overly broad role in GCP has greater implications than in the other tools, as you are working with infrastructure here rather than reports.

What is the difference between an owner and a manager?

The difference lies in control over the account itself. An owner can delete the account or profile and can add and remove other users, including other owners. An administrator can carry out the work (change settings, create campaigns, respond to reviews) but cannot close the account and usually cannot manage users.

The practical rule: you or your business partner retain the owner role. Everyone who works for you is assigned an administrator or editor role. This ensures that no one can accidentally or deliberately delete anything that you can no longer access.

That may sound strict, but it isn’t a matter of mistrust. It’s simply a clear separation of roles, and it prevents the most unpleasant situation imaginable: an account you can no longer access because the sole owner no longer works for your company or can no longer be contacted.

This is how you keep your access management in order

Granting rights is a one-off task. Almost everyone forgets to sort out rights. So make a recurring note in your diary – for example, twice a year – and then go through these five points:

• Who currently has access? Open the permissions overview for each tool and read the list. You’ll often find names there that you wouldn’t expect to see.
• Are there any former employees or old agencies listed? Remove them. They won’t be notified, so you don’t need to discuss it with them.
• Are the roles still appropriate? Someone you appointed as a manager three years ago for a single job may no longer need to fulfil that role.
• Do you still own everything? Your Analytics account, your Ads account, your Search Console property, your Business Profile and your domain name.
• Is two-factor authentication enabled on your own account? It’s the simplest security measure there is and it takes just two minutes.

Would you like us to set up your analytics and your adverts? In that case, we’ll only ask for the rights we need, and you retain ownership. Get in touch and we’ll explain exactly what we need and why. Clear from the outset, as always.