Unable to Remove Primary Contact in Google Ads Payments Profile

Being one of the leading Google Ads Partner agency in UAE and India, we come across various issues on the accounts of our clients. Google Ads platform is pretty user friendly and we can solve most of the issues ourselves. At times, we may have to take support and help from the Google support team to resolve certain issues, especially when there are glitches in the system.

Here is one such issue we came across with Google Ads platform – one of our clients was not able to remove the previous company from their Payments Users on the Billing settings. Unfortunately, this user from the previous agency was setup as the primary user on the Payments users list and so, it was not possible to take full control of the account after the previous agency was removed from the account.

Here is the background: This client recently switched from their existing digital marketing agency in Dubai to us. Before they handed over their digital properties to us, they removed the previous agency from all their accounts. As part of this, they removed the users from the previous agency from the Users list. Also, their agency rights were removed from the “Managers” list as well. However, the client forgot to change the primary user on the Billing Users.

Once we were selected as their digital marketing agency, we did an audit on their AdWords account and found out that oen of the users from the previous agency was still listed as the “Primary Contact”. Unfortunately, there was no option to remove the primary contact from the Payment profile. It appears that only the Primary contact can assign the ownership to another user but the Primary contact was no longer an account user.

Check Your Payments Users

Many AdWords users look only at the “Users” list to see who have access to their account. You may want to check your Payments Profile as well to ensure no unauthorised users are getting updates from your billing and transactions. Here is how you can check:

1. Click on the “Tools” menu on the top right corner

2. Click on “Billing and payments”

3. Click on “Settings” on the left navigation.

4. Scroll down and look for “Payments Users”

Do you see any surprise users there? If you have Admin privileges on the Account and if you are the Primary contact, you can remove the unauthorized users from there. Ideally, you should see the option to “Add New User” and also, you should be able to remove any of the users from there.

If you are not the Primary Contact and the Primary Contact is no longer accessible, then you have a problem. You won’t be ale to reassign the role to someone else. This is where you need to take help from Google.

Contact Google Ads support to replace the Primary Billing Contact

Now your only option is to contact Google AdWords support and take their manual assistance to replace the contact in the Billing users section. Follow the steps below to contact the customer support:

1. Click on the “?” symbol on the top right corner

2. Check the “Worldwide phone support” link in the bottom part of the menu

3. Find the phone number in your country and call the customer support. Validate your access to the account by following the instructions from the agent.

4. Explain your situation. Mention that you are the primary person responsible for this account.

5. The support person will assist you and will manually change the Primary contact on the Billing Users list.

In some cases, they will send you an email in the registered email address and ask for further details in an official mail for the records. In one of the cases we handled, they asked us for the details as shown in the below email:

After your discussion with Google support, if you get a verification email as shown above, just go ahead and respond with all the details. The support team will manually change your Billing User and change the primary contact to your email address. In our case, it will just a couple of hours to complete the entire process and remove the old user from the account.

In my case, even after sending the above details, I was contacted by Google Ads support team for further verification. I was asked to send another email, stating and confirming that I am the legal representative of the Ad account and I wanted Google to make the specific change in the Payment profile. Once I sent the confirmation email, they made the required changes. I received an Invitation mail asking me to ACCEPT the invitation to become the primary contact on the billing account. Once I accepted the invitation, I became the Primary Billing Contact and I was able to remove the other profiles myself. That solved the issues in removing the ex-employee/previous agency as the primary billing contact in the AdWords account.

Are you facing difficulties in removing a Billing contact from Google Ads account?

Many companies face this problem when their employees leave the company. In many cases, the employee would have setup himself as the primary billing contact and company may find it difficult to replace the old employee even if the company has full admin rights on the account. In such cases, the right approach is to make the employee himself re-assign the primary contact role to someone else in your organisation. Then the new primary contact can remove the other user.

If you have already removed the primary contact from your Users list, he won’t be able to login and reassign the primary contact role. In such case, Google support team can help you take full control of your AdWords account by manually removing the old user from your Payments profile, even though it may take some efforts as stated in the experience above.

Do you need any help in setting up your Google Ads account? SpiderWorks can help you.

Contact Us today.