Google Ads Integration

Connect a Google Ads account so agents can research keywords, build search and display campaigns, read performance and act on Google's recommendations. Because some of these actions spend money, the integration creates every campaign paused and puts publishing and budget increases behind safety settings that you control.

Before you start

• A Google account with access to a Google Ads client account that has billing configured. A manager (MCC) account is listed during setup but cannot be selected; choose one of the client accounts it manages instead.
• A tenant admin in Outermind with permission to manage connections.

You do not need a Google Cloud project or any Google Ads API credentials of your own. Outermind's own Google Cloud project and OAuth client carry the Google Ads API access that every call uses. If Google reports that this platform access is not approved for your Google Ads account, the error says it is a platform limit, not a problem with your connection, and tells you to contact Outermind support.

OAuth consent

When you sign in, Google asks you to let Outermind manage your Google Ads accounts and data. This is Google's single adwords permission; Google offers no narrower one, which is why the safety settings below exist. Google also asks for offline access, so the connection keeps working without you signing in again.

Connect in Outermind

1. Open the Capabilities hub, go to Connections, and open Google Ads. The page is at /capabilities/integrations/google-ads.
2. Click Connect Google Ads. The setup wizard opens at /capabilities/integrations/google-ads/setup.
3. Authenticate: click Connect, sign in to Google in the pop-up and approve access.
4. Select Account: choose the Google Ads account the tools should operate on. Each account shows its currency and time zone. Agents have no Google Ads tools until this step is done; if you leave the wizard before it, the connection page shows Choose a Google Ads account so you can finish later without signing in again.
5. Complete: review the safety settings on the connection page before agents get to work.
6. Grant the Google Ads tools to each agent that needs them from the agent's Tools tab (Workforce > Agents > Agents & SMEs).

Safety settings

The connection page has a Safety Settings card with three controls:

Setting	Default	What it does
Autonomous publishing	Off	When off, an agent cannot publish a campaign or raise a budget on its own; the change is held for a person to approve. When on, an agent may publish or raise a budget up to the daily cap without review.
Max daily budget	0	The largest daily budget an agent may publish or raise a campaign to without a person.
Monthly spend cap	Blank (guardrail off)	At 100% of the cap, every enabled campaign in the account is paused and publishes and budget increases are blocked, approved ones included, until the month rolls over.

Paused by default

• googleads_campaigns.create always creates the campaign paused, with its budget and first ad group. It spends nothing until it is published.
• Targets, keywords and ads can be added or changed only while the campaign is paused. A change is refused when the campaign is live or its status cannot be confirmed, so these actions never alter live serving.
• googleads_campaigns.pause works at any time, including when the account is over its monthly cap, because pausing only reduces spend.

Publishing and budget increases

googleads_campaigns.publish, googleads_campaigns.budget_increase and googleads_recommendations.apply can spend money, so they are tier high. For each call:

1. Over the monthly cap, nothing goes through. If the account is over its monthly spend cap, or Outermind cannot verify the cap status just now, the action is refused, even when a person approved it.
2. A person approved it: it runs at the budget the person saw. Publishing requires the campaign's current daily budget as a parameter and is refused if that does not match the budget Google reports, so the amount a person approves is the amount that goes live.
3. No person approved it (an agent whose autonomy level runs high actions on its own): it runs only when Autonomous publishing is on and the budget is within Max daily budget. Otherwise it is refused.

Lowering a budget is done with googleads_campaigns.update, which cannot raise one.

Monthly spend guardrail

When a monthly spend cap is set, a daily check reads the account's month-to-date spend in the account's own time zone:

• At 80%, the Business Owner gets one warning for that month. If your organisation has no Business Owner set, the admin who connected the account is notified instead.
• At 100%, every enabled campaign is paused, publishes and budget increases are blocked, and the Business Owner is notified. The block lifts when the month rolls over or when an admin raises the cap.
• If the spend cannot be read, a block already in place is kept rather than cleared.

The connection page shows the month-to-date spend against the cap and when it was last checked.

What your agents can do

Tool	Action	Class	Tier	What it does
googleads_campaigns	create	write	medium	Creates a search or display campaign, paused, with its daily budget and first ad group
	update	write	medium	Edits name, serving dates, bidding strategy, or lowers the daily budget
	pause	write	medium	Pauses a campaign so it stops serving and spending
	publish	write	high	Takes a paused campaign live at its current daily budget
	budget_increase	write	high	Raises a campaign's daily budget
googleads_targets	create	write	medium	Adds location targets or ad-group keywords to a paused campaign
	update	write	medium	Pauses, re-enables or re-bids keywords of a paused campaign
	delete	delete	high	Removes keywords from a paused campaign; Google cannot undo a removal
googleads_ads	create	write	medium	Adds responsive search ads, or callout and sitelink assets, to a paused campaign
googleads_conversions	create	write	medium	Creates a website or phone call conversion action. The Google tag must still be installed on your site through Google's own interface
googleads_keywords	ideas	read	read	Suggests related keywords with monthly searches, competition and bid ranges
googleads_performance	query	read	read	Runs one read-only report query (at most 200 rows), with cost in the account currency
googleads_recommendations	list	read	read	Lists Google's current recommendations
	apply	write	high	Applies one recommendation; budget and bidding ones can raise spend
	dismiss	write	medium	Dismisses one recommendation; nothing on the account changes

An agent's autonomy level decides which tiers it runs without asking a person: Auto Approve Low runs read and low actions, Auto Approve Medium also runs medium, and Full Autonomy also runs high. See Risk tiers.

Testing and disconnecting

• Test Connection checks that Google still accepts the connection and reports the selected customer ID.
• Reconnect appears when the token has expired or the connection is in error; it runs the wizard again with the connection kept in place.
• Disconnect Google Ads revokes the OAuth token, removes the Google Ads tools and unassigns them from every agent. Campaigns already live in Google Ads keep running; pause them in Google Ads first if you want them to stop.