User impersonation

User impersonation allows you to temporarily sign in as a different user in your network. Users with full impersonation permissions can impersonate all other users in their network and take any action, regardless of the impersonating user's own permission level. Impersonators appear as themselves in the change history.

The ability to impersonate requires user role permissions. If these options are unavailable to you, contact your administrator.

There are a number of reasons why you might want to impersonate a user:

• To help another user troubleshoot an issue. If your user roles are configured differently, it's possible that your UI will look different from theirs and you'll need to impersonate the other user to be able to see what they see.
• You want to make changes on behalf of another user (for example, the other user is away on vacation and you want to manage their orders or run a report).
• You're an administrator who's setting up user roles, and you want to preview what other users will be able to see depending on the permissions you grant them.

• You can only impersonate one user at a time.
• You can't modify another user's notification settings while you're impersonating that user.
• You can't modify your own role, even when impersonating a user who has permission to modify your role.
• If you sign out of your Ad Manager account while impersonating another user, you'll no longer be impersonating that user when you sign in again.

Activate user impersonation

Administrators can permit users in pre-defined or custom roles to impersonate other users.

1. Sign in to Google Ad Manager.
2. Click Admin  Access & authorization  Roles.
3. Select the role you want to edit.

4. Check the Impersonate users (read-only) checkbox if you only want to permit users in this role to view the UI as another user, or check Impersonate users (read/write) to permit these users to make changes.

5. Click Save.

Impersonate a user

1. Sign in to Google Ad Manager.
2. Click Admin  Access & authorization  Users or Contacts.

3. Click the name of an individual user to view the detail page.

4. Click the Impersonate link next to the user's name.

   You'll now be able to view the UI and make whatever changes you need as if you are the user you're impersonating. Both your account name and the name of the user you're impersonating will appear in the upper-right corner of your screen (for example, [e-mail] as [e-mail]).

5. To end the impersonation, click the X next to the name of the impersonated user.