Starting February 11, 2019 if you are making Google Ads API requests using OAuth credentials from a manager account and are accessing a related customer account, you will need an additional HTTP request header/grpc metadata field. You will need to set the login-customer-id header to the customer ID of the manager account, removing any hyphens in the ID.

Setting this new header is essentially equivalent to choosing an account in the Google Ads UI after signing in, and it’s configurable in the client libraries. Each library has instructions in its README that explain how to set a login-customer-id in your local configuration. Here are links to all relevant sets of instructions in each library:

• Python google-ads-python
• PHP google-ads-php
• Java google-ads-java
• Ruby google-ads-ruby
• .NET google-ads-dotnet

If this header is not set, you may begin seeing the error: USER_PERMISSION_DENIED.

For more details on request headers, including login-customer-id, see our documentation.

If you have questions, please reach out to us on the Google Ads API forum.
Ben Karl, Google Ads API Team

Update May 8, 2018: Updated roll out month.
What's changing?
Beginning mid-May, 2018, once an AdWords account reaches 15 months without any spend, it will be canceled in order to speed up the AdWords experience and help users stay within the manager account limits. This also means that right now, if your account has reached 15 months without spend, it meets the criteria and will be canceled. After an account is canceled:

• get requests for ManagedCustomerService will no longer return the account.
• Any AdWords API request that specifies the account's customer ID in the clientCustomerId header will fail with an AuthorizationError.CUSTOMER_NOT_ACTIVE starting with v201802 and an OperationAccessDenied.ACTION_NOT_PERMITTED error for earlier versions of the AdWords API.
• Any unspent prepaid amount will be refunded back to the advertiser.
• All ads in your account will stop automatically within 24 hours.

Note: Test accounts will not be canceled.

What should you do?
If your application issues AdWords API requests against inactive accounts, make sure you download any relevant data for those accounts before the cancellation process starts. For example, you may want to run reports to gather historical stats for the date range where the account had activity.

If you are using an inactive account in order to test your integration with the AdWords API, consider creating a test account instead. Test accounts will not be canceled by the ongoing cancellation process.

To avoid issues once the cancellation process starts, you can proactively cancel accounts as follows:

• Log into your manager account.
• Go to the Accounts page, where you can adjust the date range and review the performance metrics for each account under the manager account to help you identify inactive accounts.
• Check the box next to each account you want to cancel.
• Select Edit -> Cancel account.

To reactivate an account, follow the instructions in the AdWords Help Center. If you are logged in as a manager account, you can show canceled accounts by adjusting the filter in the upper left corner as follows:

Note: If the account is under one or more manager accounts, you will only be able to reactivate the account if doing so will not exceed the manager account limits.

If you have any questions, please contact us via the forum.
- Josh Radcliff, AdWords API Team

Starting with v201506 of the AdWords API, you can:

• Hide or unhide an AdWords account under your manager account by setting the isHidden attribute of its ManagedCustomerLink to true or false, respectively.
• Exclude hidden accounts in ManagedCustomerService.get and ManagedCustomerService.query calls by specifying ExcludeHiddenAccounts = true in your predicate or AWQL WHERE clause.

With these new features, you can hide old or inactive accounts to reduce clutter in your managed account's dashboard, as well as detect and exclude hidden accounts using the AdWords API.

As with the AdWords user interface, you can only hide or unhide AdWords accounts. Any attempt to hide a manager account will result in a ManagedCustomerServiceError.CANNOT_HIDE_OR_UNHIDE_MANAGER_ACCOUNTS error.

Don't worry -- hiding an account doesn’t affect serving:

• You can always unhide an account by setting the isHidden attribute of its ManagedCustomerLink back to false.
• You can retrieve all of your accounts by setting ExcludeHiddenAccounts to false in your selector, or by not specifying a predicate on ExcludeHiddenAccounts.
• Ads in hidden accounts will continue to serve.

More manager account resources

• Guide on managing customer accounts.
• Latest docs on ManagedCustomerLink and ManagedCustomer.

Still have questions? Feel free to visit us on the AdWords API Forum or our Google+ page.

- Josh Radcliff, AdWords API Team