On August 29th we issued a revision of the Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions that will affect many AdWords accounts within the United States. Since many of you manage US-based accounts via the API, we wanted to call attention to this event as it requires account holders or their managers to physically “click to accept” the new Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions.

To be clear... these Terms and Conditions apply to AdWords users (regardless of whether or not they use the API), and are separate and distinct from the changes that we announced to the AdWords API beta Terms and Conditions.

Affected AdWords account holders will have until November 27, 2006 to log in to their accounts and either accept or reject the new Google Advertising Program Terms & Conditions. If an account has not accepted these new Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions by this deadline, API access will be blocked until the user accepts.

We recommend that you speak with your advertisers/clients in order to determine who should review and accept/decline these terms.

Account managers (MCC users) can automatically accept these new Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions for all affected accounts under their My Client Center by logging into the MCC, navigating to an affected child account, and accepting the Google Advertising Program Terms & Conditions. This action will then instantaneously accept the new Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions for all other accounts under that MCC. If you maintain a nested/hierarchical MCC structure, please be sure that you login to your top-most MCC when you accept the changes. This will ensure that all of your sub-accounts will automatically accept the Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions.

Unfortunately, we're unable to interpret the meaning of changes in our legal documents for you. If you have questions or you need legal advice on interpreting the terms, we encourage you to consult counsel to help you understand how these changes may affect you.

Again, please note that in order to ensure uninterrupted access to your accounts, the new Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions must be accepted before November 27, 2006.

-- Jon Diorio, Sr. Product Marketing Manager