• by Laurie Sullivan , 10 hours ago

Google has rolled out additions to its agency administration features in Merchant Center for Agencies, which initially launched in March to streamline workflows.

While the initial launch introduced the foundational architecture of the Google Merchant Center for Agencies dashboard to manage multiple client portfolios in one central place, Thursday’s update introduces a “security and management” feature that enables an organization give employees precise, limited access to digital tools in what the announcement calls “granular user governance.”

The updates focus on how an agency can legally, securely and operationally divide access to clients' data, according to Ginny Marvin, Google Ads Liaison.

Security is the top addition. It protects an agency’s clients by designating agency admins with master controls vs. standard users with restricted permissions.

New custom labels offer more granular control, which is most helpful for larger agencies.

When a rep wanted an agency employee to support a client that access was often connected to the individual user's Google account in the previous iteration of the platform. Now the client’s accounts are now linked directly to the rep’s agency.

“Clients are linked directly to your agency rather than individual users,” Marvin wrote in a LinkedIn post.

The new “custom labels” allows admins to group client accounts by brand, vertical or team and manage user views together as one package.

Google made Merchant Center for Agencies generally available in the U.S. and Canada in March.

This change allows the agency rep to grant, adjust, or completely remove access to client accounts from one central panel. Ties between the client and rep can be severed by the agency if the employee leaves without having to manually dig through dozens of individual client-level invites.

When Google introduced Merchant Center for Agencies earlier this year, it launched with an overview page that provides a summary of all the agency rep’s client accounts. These include key statistics and account issues. The page also highlights top accounts with important metrics such as clicks and disapprovals, and the diagnostic page enables the rep to focus on urgent issues.