Who should own your ad accounts

When a business hires an agency to run its ads, one early decision gets less attention than it deserves: whose name is on the ad account. It looks like paperwork. It decides what the business keeps if the relationship ends. An ad account is not just a place to spend money. It holds the history of every campaign, the conversions the tracking recorded, the audiences built from the business's own customers, and everything the platforms' bidding has learned along the way. Starting over without it costs months. Our position is simple: the client owns the accounts, and the agency is invited in. On Google Ads, the business holds its own account and links it to the agency's manager account. Google is clear that even a manager account that owns a client account does not take the data with it: "The client account still owns its data and has the ability to remove ownership access by unlinking." On Meta, the business's own portfolio holds the ad account, the Page and the pixel, and the agency is added as a partner with the access it needs. The reverse arrangement is the one to avoid. An ad account created inside an agency's business portfolio stays in that portfolio; Meta does not let it be moved out later. If an agency offers to "just set it up on our side", that is the moment to say no. Ownership also settles the money question. Google's transparency rules for agencies and other third parties require them to give customers their account IDs on request, to disclose management fees on every invoice, and to "report the exact amount charged by Google, exclusive of any fees that you charge." We think that is the right standard on every platform, not just on Google. Four questions any business can ask its agency today: Are the ad accounts, the Page and the tracking in our business's name? Is your access something we granted, and could remove? Do our reports show the exact platform spend, separately from your fee? If we asked for our account IDs today, would we get them today? If every answer is yes, the business can change agencies without losing a single campaign's history. That is not a risk to a good agency. It is the reason a client can trust one.