How to create a Google Ads account

You want a Google Ads account. Not a campaign, not keywords, not an ad — just the account, so that it exists and you can decide what to do with it later. Maybe you are getting set up before you are ready to spend, maybe someone else will run it, maybe you just want to look around inside.

It takes about six minutes. The problem is that Google does not offer "create an empty account" as a visible option. The signup flow is literally called Create your first campaign, and it is built for someone who wants a search ad live today. If that is not you, most of what it asks is noise — and answering it badly leaves settings on the account that can never be changed.

Why this is harder than it should be

Google's own help page describes signup as three steps: add business information, select campaign goals and budget, enter payment details. It notes, in one sentence, that "you can skip all recommendations to create a campaign" — without saying how.

Meanwhile every third-party guide currently ranking for this — including the one published by the best-known access-management tool — tells you to click Switch to Expert Mode. That link no longer appears during signup. Google renamed it. The mode still exists internally (the step it leads to still carries currentStep=expert in the URL), but the words "Expert Mode" are nowhere on the screen, which is why Google's support forums are full of people asking where the switch went.

Everything below was walked end to end on a brand-new Google account in August 2026, and every screenshot is from that run.

Before you start

Four things, and each one matters later in a way the signup does not warn you about:

The signup will ask for all four of those anyway. Everything you set there is work someone has to unpick later, so the aim is to give Google the minimum it will accept and stop.

Step 1: Open the account

Go to ads.google.com and click Start now. Sign in with the Google account that should own the ads account — this matters, because ownership follows the Google account you are signed in as, and it is a nuisance to move later.

If that Google account has never advertised, you get a small dialog with two options.

The moment you click it, Google assigns the account a customer ID — you can see it appear in the top right corner and in the browser tab. Nothing has been created in any meaningful sense yet, but the number is real, and it is the number you will need to grant anyone else access.

Step 2: Business name and website

The first screen asks for your business name and where people should go after clicking your ad.

The business name is optional and becomes the account name — use the client's real trading name, because this is what everyone will see in account lists forever after. The URL is required: leave it empty and you get "Enter a valid website URL". If the business genuinely has no website, switch to Your business phone number or Your app download page on the same screen.

Give Google a URL and it will crawl the page immediately, then show you a description of your business and a set of category tags it wrote itself.

Step 3: Skip the linking step

Next Google offers to link a Google Business Profile, a YouTube channel, a phone number and a mobile app. Click Skip.

This is not a permanent decision — linking can be done at any time afterwards, and those choices are better made deliberately later than attached during signup.

Step 4: The link almost nobody finds

Now Google asks you to choose a goal for your campaign: purchases, lead form, phone calls, page views, brand awareness. There is a Skip button, which does not do what you want — it skips the goal, not the campaign, and drops you into the ad builder anyway.

What you want is a line of small grey text at the very bottom of the page, below everything else:

Click Set up an account only and the campaign builder is gone.

Step 5: The three settings you cannot undo

This is the most important screen in the entire process, and Google gives it less ceremony than the choice of ad headline.

Three fields, all permanent:

• Billing country — determines which payment methods you can use.
• Time zone — every report and every billing period is bucketed by this. Set it to the business's operating time zone, not yours if you happen to be elsewhere.
• Currency — all spend is denominated in it, forever. If you report in euros and the account is in dollars, every number carries an exchange rate.

Google defaults to the country it infers from your connection, which is not necessarily the country the business bills from. Read all three before continuing.

Step 6: Billing is not optional

The last screen asks for a payments profile. It is tempting to close the tab here — the account exists, it has an ID, surely that is enough to hand over?

It is not. We checked: with signup left incomplete, opening the account's own user-access page redirects straight back to this payment step. The page where you grant anyone access is not reachable until billing is done. An account without a payment method is not a half-finished account you can pass along; it is an account nobody else can be let into.

Two things on this screen deserve a look before you submit:

The promotion. Google offers a spend-matching credit to new advertisers — at the time of writing, spend $500 and get $500 in credits, applied after billing setup, for new advertisers only and with a deadline. If the business is going to spend anyway, take it; the offer is attached at signup and is awkward to claim afterwards.

The strategist opt-in. Google asks whether you want "personalized guidance from a Google Ads account strategist by phone or messaging app". If you know what you are doing, or someone else is running the account, answer No. Saying yes routes a Google sales representative to the account, and their recommendations — broad match, maximised budgets, automated campaign types — routinely conflict with whatever plan you or your marketing partner already have.

Step 7: Find your customer ID

Once billing is submitted the account is finished: live, and completely empty. Nothing is running and nothing is spending — Google cannot charge you for a campaign that does not exist.

The last thing to note is the customer ID in the top right, formatted 123-456-7890. It is the account's identity, and you will be asked for it more often than you expect — by Google support, when you link Analytics or Search Console, and by anyone who needs access.

From here you can build a campaign whenever you are ready, or leave the account sitting empty indefinitely. An empty account costs nothing.

If someone else is going to run it

Send them the customer ID and nothing else. They send an access request against that number, you approve it from inside the account, and they are in with their own login.

Do not send your Google password, and be wary of anyone who asks for it. Google's access model exists precisely so that someone can run an account without ever holding your login — and anyone who asks for the password instead is telling you something about how they handle everyone else's.

What the other guides get wrong

Three things, consistently:

They tell you to look for "Switch to Expert Mode." It is not on the screen any more. The concept survives — the URL still says expert — but a reader following those instructions will scan the goal step, fail to find the words, and conclude they have to build a campaign after all. This is the single most common reason people end up with a junk campaign attached to a brand-new account.

They walk you through the campaign. Thirteen steps of keywords, headlines, bids and budgets, in a guide whose reader mostly wanted an account. If someone else is running the account, every one of those steps is work you will pay for twice: once to do it, once for whoever runs the account to undo it.

They imply the account is usable once it exists. The customer ID appears within seconds, which makes it feel finished. It is not finished until billing is on it, and the specific failure — the access page bouncing you back to payment — is the kind of thing that costs a day of confused email.

Not every platform works this way. On LinkedIn the account is genuinely created without billing — it just sits on hold and cannot serve. Google is the stricter of the two.

FAQ

Setting up the same account elsewhere? We walked LinkedIn and Meta the same way — and the three differ on every point that matters, including which settings are permanent and whether billing blocks anything.