One Report Across Many Manager Accounts, No Data Warehouse

Reporting · October 21, 2026

Our team’s campaigns sat across several manager accounts (MCCs), some ours and some belonging to outside agencies. Getting one view meant opening each one.

The constraint

The team needed to own and run this without depending on a central data team. So I kept it deliberately small: no warehouse.

Google Ads API (Python) → Google Sheets → Looker Studio

One row per campaign per day, with the manager account, owner, account, campaign, spend, currency, and performance metrics. Looker Studio reads the sheet directly.

The error that wasn’t about permissions

Querying accounts under a manager account kept returning USER_PERMISSION_DENIED, even though access was definitely there.

The cause: the API needs to be told which manager account you’re acting through. Setting login_customer_id to the manager account’s ID before each query fixed it. For top-level accounts queried directly, it needed resetting to empty.

The error message points at permissions. The actual problem is context.

Other things that cost time

• Creating OAuth credentials does not enable the APIs. The Google Ads API and Sheets API each need enabling separately.
• During the OAuth flow, a broken browser page on the local redirect is expected. The token prints in the terminal right after.
• Listing accessible customers only returns what the signed-in identity can see, so missing accounts usually mean a missing grant, not a bug.

Verify current behaviour in the Google Ads API docs; setup steps change between versions.

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