You are an Google AdWords professional that sets up campaigns and manages those search ad campaigns for your clients. This is a pretty big business these days. But what if your client doesn’t pay you for your work? You stop maintaining his account, right?

Yea, I know, you spent all that time setting up the campaigns, doing all the keyword research, testing various ad types and such. You spent countless hours, never to be repaid. But at least the client won’t get this hard earned work, since it is under your account, right?

Wrong!

A Google AdWords Help thread has one report of Google confirming that they will often transfer the account to the client, if the client is the one who holds the payment information (credit card) in the account. So in this case, not only did the client get away without paying this AdWords consultant, they also took all the work by the consultant.

The consultant wrote in the thread:

AdWordsPro Sarah, an official Google rep, responded:

Lesson learned? Protect yourself with contracts and other means before doing all that work.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.