Do I own my Google Ads account if I hire an agency?
You should, and with us you do. A Google Ads account has one Customer ID and one owner. A good agency asks for access to your account through their manager account, the same way an accountant gets access to your books without owning your company.
The arrangement to avoid is the one where your campaigns are built inside the agency's own account. It looks identical while things are going well. The difference only appears when you leave: campaigns built inside an agency account cannot be moved out. You do not get them back, you get a copy at best, and usually you start again.
Ask any agency one question before you sign: "Will the campaigns live in an account with my own Customer ID and my own billing?" If the answer is anything other than a straight yes, you have learned something important.
What happens to my campaigns if I stop paying the agency?
With us, the campaigns keep running and you keep paying Google directly. Your ad spend has always gone from your card to Google, never through us, so stopping our management fee does not switch your ads off.
That separation matters more than it sounds. When an agency bills you a single figure covering both their fee and your ad spend, you cannot see what you actually spent on advertising, you cannot verify the numbers against Google, and the day you leave the ads stop because the card on the account was theirs.
Do I own my website if I leave my marketing agency?
With us, yes — the domain, the hosting and the files. Your domain stays registered in your name and your hosting account stays in your name, even when we build and maintain the site.
The common trap is a website you rent without realising it: built on the agency's platform, hosted on their account, on a domain they registered for you. Cancel, and the site goes dark. Some contractors discover this only when the renewal notice never arrives because it was never going to their address.
Before you sign with anyone, ask who the domain is registered to and where the site is hosted. You can check the first yourself in about thirty seconds with a WHOIS lookup.
Will you bid on my own brand name?
Only if you ask us to, and we will tell you when it is a waste of money. Bidding on your own company name is sometimes worth it — when a competitor is bidding on it, or when a lead vendor is running ads against your name to resell your own customers back to you.
What we do not do is quietly run a branded campaign and then report those conversions as our result. Someone who searches your business name by name was already yours. Counting them as leads the agency produced is the oldest way to make a mediocre account look successful, and it is one of the first things we look for in the free audit.
What do I need to get from my agency before I cancel?
Get administrator access to every account, and export your data, before you give notice. Access is straightforward to obtain while the relationship is still cordial and can become very difficult afterwards. The checklist below is the order to do it in.
This applies whether you are leaving for us, for another agency, or to bring the work in-house. Use it either way — it costs us nothing and it is the single most useful thing on this page.
How do I transfer my Google Ads account to a new agency?
If the account is genuinely yours, it is a permissions change, not a transfer. You remove the old agency's manager account from your account and accept an invitation from the new one. The campaigns, history and conversion data never move, because the account never moves. It takes a few minutes.
If the account is not yours, there is no transfer to make. The new agency rebuilds from scratch, and the account starts with no conversion history — which affects how Google's automated bidding performs in the first weeks. That gap is the real cost of not owning your account, and it is why the question is worth asking on day one rather than on the way out.
