I got an email from a client of mine, actually it came from his web development company asking for his Google AdWords ID. I questioned them on it and they responded with "we need it to setup Google Analytics for the customer." I explained to them we can setup tracking for the customer for Analytics through URL tagging but they insist on the AdWords ID... Not sure why but it's causing some suspicion on my end. Are they able to pull cost figures from AdWords into Analytics? Anyone have any experience with this? What can someone, especially a 3rd party do with a clients customer ID from AdWords?
You can give access to their ID using which they will be able to see the adwords campaign but will never make any changes. Dont give them administrative access.. You can find details in access drop down which will give you notification of what all access you want your third party client to give..
Unless you agree with a third party to manage your Adwords account, don't give your account ID away. Not that they can do much with it. If you provide your ID, they can request to link your account to theirs (must be a special MCC account). You must then approve this request from your account. So until you approve the linkage, they can't do a thing. Once you give them access, they can make any changes they want to your campaigns. If you give them administrative access, they can change your credit card and your password (that would be bad). The other access is called User Interface and this allows to only make changes to campaigns. Also allows linking Analytics to Adwords although you don't absolutely need to do this and I'm sure you could do it yourself easily enough.