Your agency should not own your ad account
It is the single most expensive thing to get wrong at the start of a relationship, and it costs nothing to get right.
The account, the billing and the data should sit under your own company, with the agency added as a user. Ending the relationship should mean removing an access, not rebuilding a year of history you paid to create.
What you actually lose
An advertising account is not just campaigns. It is conversion history, audience lists built from your own customers, quality signals earned over months, negative keyword work, and the record of every test that told you what does not work. A new account starts at zero on all of it.
In practice this shows up as two or three months of worse performance after a switch, at full spend, for reasons nobody can point at. That is the cost of the migration, and it is paid by you.
Why it happens
Rarely malice. Usually an agency set the account up on day one because it was faster, and nobody wrote down whose it was. By the time the question matters, the answer is inconvenient for one side and expensive for the other.
There is also a version of this that is deliberate, where the account is the reason leaving is painful. You can tell them apart by asking early, when nothing is at stake.
How to set it up correctly
This takes twenty minutes at the start and is unavailable later without a migration.
- Create the advertising account under your own company identity, not the agency's
- Put your own payment method on it, and keep the invoices
- Own the analytics property and the tag container the same way
- Add the agency as a user or through their manager account, never as the owner
- Keep at least one administrator inside your company who is not the agency
If it is already the wrong way round
Ask for ownership to be transferred rather than for a copy. Both Google and Meta support moving an account between managers without losing its history, and an agency comfortable with the relationship will not object. A refusal is the answer.
What to take from this
- 01Own the account, the billing, the analytics and the tag container
- 02The agency is a user on your account, not its owner
- 03A switch without ownership costs two to three months of performance at full spend
- 04Ask on day one, when the answer is cheap
Ask the question directly
- Does this apply to Meta and TikTok too?
- Yes, and the audiences make it sharper. Custom audiences built from your customer list live inside the ad account, and rebuilding them from scratch is the part that hurts most.
- What if the agency built everything in their account already?
- Ask for a transfer of ownership rather than a rebuild. It is supported, it keeps the history, and it takes an afternoon.
Related answers
Performance marketing
Google Ads, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn run as one account structure, with conversion tracking you can defend and spend paced against cost per qualified lead rather than clicks.
SEO or Google Ads first?
Bring the decision you are stuck on
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