Absolutely, categorically NO!
You grant them access to your account so you retain access, history and ultimate control.
I had a conversation this week with a small business owner that needs help with their paid campaigns on Facebook and Google Ads; let’s call her “Jane”.
Unfortunately for Jane, she doesn’t own her accounts – her current digital marketing agency has the only key and won’t hand it over. This means no one else can access the data to assess its performance. She’s stuck.
I get it. For some small businesses, the prospect of setting up an ad account of your own on Facebook Business Manager or on the Google Ads platform seems too hard – yourself or your team don’t have the know-how (read, confidence and the right support) to do so and someone saying “oh we’ll run them on our account” seems an easy solution.
But this means you don’t own your Ad account, so you don’t own it’s all-important history and you are completely reliant on someone else giving you access.
If you don’t have access to the account, not only can you be locked out but you are left with only the information the Agency chooses to provide to you. While you can expect charges for management and optimisation, they shouldn’t be marking-up the actual ad-spend. For my micro or very tech-challenged clients, I often set-up them up on their own account on their behalf, and then *they* grant me access as a Partner account.
So what do you do if you find yourself in this position?
Request administrator access. This means you have shared control of the account and can remove them from it if you choose to.
If that fails, request a full export of your account. You can then start a new account and import these settings, campaigns, ad-groups or ad-sets and ads. While you won’t have access to your old account history, at least you won’t have to start from scratch.
Depending on the complexity of the account and spend history you may choose to simply cut your losses, instruct your old agency to cancel your account and start again afresh with your new agency.
While the new agency will need to perform new keyword research, create ads, potentially build new landing pages, it’s a good bet that with better overall practices, your ads will perform better than they ever have.
