Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy explains how John Luis Raymundo (ABN 17 461 248 283), trading as Emergency Marketing (“we”, “us”, “our”) handles personal information in connection with PPC Watchdog (the “Service”), available at ppcwatchdog.emergencymarketing.com.au.
We handle personal information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). Where the Service accesses data from Google advertising accounts, we additionally comply with the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.
1. What the Service does
PPC Watchdog monitors paid advertising accounts that you connect to it. It audits the search terms that caused your ads to appear and identifies those accruing spend without converting, or showing intent mismatched to your campaign, and it recommends negative keywords for you to apply yourself. It also alerts you when it detects conditions you have configured — for example, unexpected spend increases, campaigns that have stopped serving, or conversion tracking failures. To do this, it reads data from your advertising accounts on your authorisation.
2. Information we collect
2.1 Information you give us
- Your name, business name, email address and, if provided, phone number
- Account credentials for the Service (we store a cryptographic hash of your password, never the password itself)
- Billing details, where the Service is provided on a paid basis — payment card numbers are handled directly by our payment processor and are not stored on our systems
- Alert rules, thresholds and notification preferences that you configure
- Any information you include when you contact us for support
2.2 Advertising platform data
When you connect an advertising account, you authorise us to read data from it. Depending on the platform, this may include campaign, ad group, keyword and ad-level performance metrics; the search terms that caused your ads to appear, which are dealt with separately in section 2.3 below; spend, budget and bidding settings; account and campaign status; conversion tracking configuration and conversion counts; and account identifiers and names.
We request read access only. The Service does not create, pause, edit or delete campaigns, ads, budgets or bids, and does not spend money on your behalf.
2.3 Search terms
We read the search queries that caused your ads to appear, as reported by Google Ads in its search terms report. These are words typed by members of the public into Google, not by you. Google discloses a search term to advertisers only where it meets Google’s own privacy threshold, and we receive no identifier for the person who typed it.
We store a search term only where an audit flags it — that is, where it is accruing spend without converting, or shows intent mismatched to your campaign — together with the associated spend, click and conversion figures, and any decision you record about it. We do not store the full search terms report. Flagged search terms are retained in line with the retention periods set out in section 9 and are deleted with the rest of your account record when your account is closed.
2.4 Technical information
- IP address, browser type and device information
- Pages accessed, features used and timestamps
- Diagnostic and error logs generated when the Service runs
- Advertising measurement identifiers set on our public and sign-up pages, and a record of which of those pages you reached — see section 10
3. Google user data and Limited Use
Where you connect a Google Ads account, the Service accesses Google user data through the Google Ads API using OAuth 2.0. You grant this access explicitly through Google's own consent screen, and you can revoke it at any time from your Google Account permissions page or from within the Service.
Limited Use commitment. PPC Watchdog's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Specifically: we use Google user data only to provide and improve the monitoring and alerting features you can see in the Service; we do not transfer or sell it to advertisers, data brokers, credit assessment services or information resellers; we do not use it for advertising or ad targeting; and we do not allow humans to read it except with your explicit consent, where necessary for security purposes, to comply with applicable law, or where the data has been aggregated and anonymised for internal operations.
3.1 How we store Google data
We read Google Ads data live at the time of each monitoring check and retain it only as long as needed to evaluate your alert rules. We do not maintain a persistent copy of your raw advertising performance data.
What we do retain is limited to:
- Account identifiers and account names, so we know which accounts to monitor
- The alert rules and thresholds you configure
- Derived alert state — for example, a record that a spend threshold was breached at a given time, and the value that triggered it
- Flagged search terms — the individual search queries an audit has identified as wasteful, together with the associated spend, click and conversion figures and any decision you record about them, as described in section 2.3
- Short-lived aggregates held in cache for operational efficiency, expiring within 24 hours
Your OAuth refresh token is stored encrypted at rest and is used solely to re-authenticate against the Google Ads API on your behalf. Revoking access invalidates it immediately.
4. How we use information
| Purpose | Information used |
|---|---|
| Monitoring your accounts and evaluating alert rules | Advertising platform data, alert rules |
| Sending you alerts and notifications | Contact details, derived alert state |
| Creating and administering your account | Information you give us |
| Billing and account management | Contact and billing details |
| Providing support and responding to enquiries | Contact details, support correspondence, diagnostic logs |
| Securing the Service and investigating misuse | Technical information |
| Diagnosing faults and improving reliability | Technical information, aggregated usage data |
| Measuring and targeting our own advertising | Advertising measurement identifiers, contact details in hashed form, technical information — see section 10 |
| Meeting legal and tax obligations | Billing records, account records |
We do not sell personal information. We do not use your advertising data to benchmark, train models, or build products for other customers.
5. Direct marketing
We may send you service-related messages — alerts, security notices, billing notices and material changes to these terms — and you cannot opt out of these while you hold an account, because they are necessary to provide the Service. Any promotional email is sent only where permitted under the Spam Act 2003 (Cth) and always includes an unsubscribe link. You can also opt out at any time by emailing us.
6. Who we disclose information to
We disclose personal information only as set out below.
- Service providers who help us operate the Service — hosting and infrastructure, error monitoring, email delivery, and payment processing. They may access personal information only to perform services for us, and are bound to protect it.
- Advertising platforms — we exchange authorisation and request data with Google and any other platform you connect, in order to read your account data.
- Meta Platforms, Inc. — where you visit our public website, sign-up, pricing or payment confirmation pages, we disclose the website events and identifiers described in section 10 so that we can measure the effectiveness of our own advertising. We never disclose data read from your advertising accounts to Meta.
- Professional advisers — accountants and lawyers, where reasonably necessary.
- Where required by law — to comply with a subpoena, court order, regulatory request or other legal obligation, or to protect the rights, property or safety of any person.
- On a business transfer — if the business is sold or restructured, subject to the recipient handling the information consistently with this policy. Where Google user data is involved, we will obtain your explicit prior consent.
7. Overseas disclosure
Some of our service providers store or process data outside Australia, including in the United States and the European Union. Before disclosing personal information overseas we take reasonable steps to ensure the recipient does not breach the APPs. By using the Service you acknowledge that information may be handled outside Australia and that, in some cases, overseas privacy laws may differ from Australian law.
8. Security
We take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, interference, loss, and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. These include encryption in transit (TLS), encryption at rest for credentials and OAuth tokens, access controls limiting who can reach production systems, and collecting and retaining as little data as we can.
No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a data breach occurs that is likely to result in serious harm, we will notify you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as required by the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.
9. Retention
We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purposes described in this policy, or as required by law. Advertising performance data is not retained beyond the cache periods described in section 3.1, other than flagged search terms and the decisions you record about them, which form part of your account record and are retained on the basis set out below. Account and alert-history records are retained while your account is active and for up to 12 months after closure. Billing and tax records are retained for 7 years as required under Australian tax law. After the relevant period, information is deleted or de-identified.
10. Cookies and advertising technologies
Essential cookies. The Service uses cookies that are strictly necessary for it to function — keeping you signed in and maintaining your session. If you block these, the Service will not work.
Advertising cookies and measurement. Our public website and sign-up pages use the Meta pixel, an advertising technology provided by Meta Platforms, Inc. It sets first-party cookies in your browser and reports to Meta when you visit those pages, open the demo dashboard, begin creating an account, start a checkout, or complete a purchase. This tells us which of our advertisements lead to sign-ups, and allows us to show our advertisements to people who have visited the site. We also send the same events to Meta from our servers, which allows measurement to work when your browser blocks the pixel; where we do this we send your email address and, if provided, phone number only in an irreversibly hashed form, together with your IP address, browser user agent and the Meta cookie identifiers described above.
Where these do and do not run. These technologies run on our marketing pages, the sign-in and sign-up pages, the pricing page and the payment confirmation page only. They do not run on your dashboard or on any other page of the Service, and no data read from your advertising accounts — including search terms, spend or performance figures — is ever sent to Meta or to any other advertising or analytics provider. This is a deliberate boundary and it is also required of us by the Google API Services User Data Policy referred to in section 3.
Your choices. You can block or delete cookies through your browser settings, and you can limit how Meta uses information about you through the ad settings on your Meta account. Blocking advertising cookies does not affect your use of the Service. Signed-in customers can use the Service without ever loading the pages that carry these technologies.
11. Accessing and correcting your information
You can request access to the personal information we hold about you, and ask us to correct anything inaccurate, out of date or incomplete. Email us at the address below. We will respond within 30 days. We do not charge for access requests, though we may charge a reasonable fee for the cost of retrieving and supplying information in unusual cases. If we refuse a request, we will tell you why in writing.
You can disconnect any advertising account at any time from within the Service, which stops all further data access immediately.
12. Complaints
If you believe we have breached the Australian Privacy Principles, contact us first at hello@emergencymarketing.com.au with the details. We will acknowledge your complaint within 5 business days and aim to resolve it within 30 days.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you can refer the complaint to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner — oaic.gov.au, 1300 363 992.
13. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. The effective date at the top shows when it last changed. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will notify you by email or through the Service before it takes effect. Where a change affects how we use Google user data, we will obtain your consent before applying it.
14. Contact us
John Luis Raymundo, trading as Emergency Marketing
ABN 17 461 248 283
New South Wales, Australia
hello@emergencymarketing.com.au