Is it normal for an agency to run ads out of their own account?

It is common and it is still the wrong setup for you. Agencies do it because one account is easier for them to manage and because it makes the client harder to lose. The fix costs them nothing: you open the account under your own business, then add them as a partner or link them as a manager. They get the same access. You keep the asset.

What if I already signed and the accounts are in their name?

Ask for the transfer in writing while the relationship is still good, not on the way out. Meta and Google both support moving an account between owners without deleting its history, and most vendors will do it if you ask calmly and early. If the answer is no, you now know something important, and you have time to plan around it instead of scrambling.

They built my website. Do they get to keep it?

Read the agreement, because that one really can go either way. What is never negotiable is the domain: the registrar account should be in your name with your login. A site can be rebuilt in a few weeks. A domain you do not control takes your email, your reviews, your printed materials and your rankings with it.

Why does the tracking phone number matter so much?

Because it ends up printed on your trucks, your yard signs and your business cards. If that number belongs to your vendor and it cannot be ported out, leaving them means every physical thing you printed now points at a number they control. Ask whether the number ports before it goes on a vehicle wrap.

Does owning everything mean I have to manage it?

No. Ownership and operation are separate. You hold the accounts and the logins, and someone else does the work inside them. That is how it works with your accountant and your bookkeeping software, and there is no reason marketing should be different.

How do you set this up for the companies you work with?

Everything is in the contractor’s name, not ours. The ad account, the pixel, the CRM, the domain and the phone number are all opened under their business, and we get access to them the way any vendor should. If a company does not have those assets yet, building them properly is exactly what the business setup package is for. Nothing about that arrangement is generous. It is the version that holds up.

CRM and software

Own your stack: your CRM, your ads account, your domain, your data

There is a test for hiring a marketing company and it takes one question to run. Four things have to be in your name: the ads account, the CRM, the domain, and the data. If a vendor holds any of them, the price of leaving is not the notice period. It is starting over.

Soroush Farokhi, ProfitPlus MediaAugust 16, 202611 min read

Here is the whole test. Ask a marketing company one question: if I fire you on a Tuesday, what do I still have on Wednesday?

Everything else on a sales call is opinion. That one is arithmetic.

Four things have to be in your name. The advertising account, the CRM, the domain, and the data. Own all four and a vendor has to keep you by being good at the job. Own none of them and they keep you by being expensive to leave. Most contractors find out which deal they signed at the worst possible moment, which is on the way out the door.

This is not a niche opinion. It is close to the industry standard test, and plenty of agencies will tell you the same thing in writing while quietly failing it themselves. So run it on everybody, including us.

1. The advertising account

Owning the ad account means the account is registered to your business, under a business portfolio or a manager account you control, and your vendor is attached to it as a partner. Not the other way round. The distinction sounds like paperwork. It is not.

Specifically, on the two platforms that matter here:

Meta. Your business portfolio owns the ad account, the Facebook page, the Instagram account and the dataset that used to be called the pixel. The agency is added as a partner with the access it needs. If the agency’s portfolio owns any of those assets, they are theirs.
Google. Your own Google Ads account, with your own customer ID, and the agency links it to their manager account. An account created inside their manager account is their account with your name on the label.
Your Google Business Profile. You are the owner. The agency is a manager. An agency listed as the owner can remove you from the profile that carries your reviews and your map ranking.

What the lock actually costs

People assume the cost of a locked ad account is inconvenience. The real cost is history.

An ad account that has been running for a year holds a record of every conversion it produced. That record is what the platform uses to decide who to show your ads to. Start a fresh account and the platform starts guessing again, so your first weeks cost more per lead than your last weeks did. Your custom audiences and your lookalike source lists are built from that same history, and they do not come with you either.

You also lose the creative record. Which video held attention, which photo set beat the others, which headline pulled. That is months of paid learning, and it lives in the account.

2. The CRM

A CRM is not a lock because of the software. It is a lock because of what sits inside it: every homeowner who ever inquired, what they wanted, what you quoted, why they said no, and when to call them back. That list is the most valuable asset a contractor builds and most contractors do not think of it as an asset at all.

Owning it means all of this is true at once:

You have an admin login of your own, not a seat somebody else can switch off.
You can export contacts, custom fields, notes, appointments, pipeline stages, tags and call recordings yourself, today, without asking.
Your account is your own sub account, not a folder inside the vendor’s single account with your leads mixed into theirs.
The billing relationship is shown to you, so you know what the platform costs and what the service costs.

Automations and templates are a fair thing for a vendor to treat as their own work. The workflow they built can be theirs. Your customer list is never theirs. Those two things get deliberately blurred in conversation, and the blur is the tell.

3. The domain and the site

The domain is the one that catches good operators out, because nobody thinks about it until it matters.

The registrar account should be in your business name with your email on it and your own login. If a vendor bought the domain on your behalf and it sits in their registrar account, they hold your website, your company email addresses, and every printed thing that names your web address.

The website itself is more negotiable and you should read what you signed. A site built on a proprietary platform with no export is a rental, and that can be an acceptable trade if you go in with your eyes open and the price reflects it. The other end of that trade is a build in your own name. What is not acceptable is finding out at the end. Ask the question early: on the last day of our agreement, do I get the files, or do I get a screenshot?

4. The data

Data is the category people nod along to and never define. Define it. Here is the list worth arguing about.

The asset	What owning it looks like	What it costs if you do not
Lead records	Export to a spreadsheet on demand, all fields	Every past inquiry stops being re-callable
Call recordings	Downloadable files, not a player you rent	No way to audit what was said, or train from it
Tracking phone number	Ports out to another provider on request	Reprint the trucks, the signs and the cards
Reviews	On a profile you own, not a vendor microsite	Years of reviews stay with the vendor
Conversion history	Lives in your ad account and stays there	The platform starts learning from zero
Creative files	The source video and photos, handed over	You pay to shoot the same jobs twice

The phone number is the one contractors underrate and then regret most physically. A tracking number is a great idea. A tracking number that belongs to somebody else, printed on the side of three vans, is a hostage situation you paid a signwriter to create.

The questions that expose lock-in on a sales call

Ask these out loud and listen to the shape of the answer, not the tone. A confident vendor answers in one sentence. A vendor who has to explain the answer is telling you the answer.

Whose business name is on the ad account, mine or yours?
Who owns the pixel or dataset, and does the conversion history stay with me?
Is my CRM my own sub account with an admin login, or a seat inside yours?
Can I export every contact, note, appointment and call recording myself, without asking you?
Which registrar holds my domain, and is the account in my name?
Am I the owner of my Google Business Profile, or a manager on it?
If we part ways, does the tracking number port out to my next provider?
What is the notice period, and what is the written list of what gets handed over on the last day?
Has anyone ever left you, and what did they walk out with?

Question nine does most of the work. Every vendor has lost a client. One who says they have not is either brand new or not being straight with you, and one who can describe the handover calmly has done it before.

The answers that should worry you

“It is easier if we keep everything under our account.”Easier for whom. It is the same amount of work either way.
“Our system is proprietary, so it does not export.”Your customer list is not their intellectual property.
“We can talk about that if you ever leave.” That is the one moment you will have the least power. Talk about it now.
“The domain is included in the package.” Included is not the same word as owned. Ask which registrar.
Any answer that arrives as a feeling instead of a fact. This is a paperwork question and it has paperwork answers.

The handover checklist, written before you need it

Get this into the agreement at the start. It is a short list and no reasonable vendor will fight it, which is exactly why the fight tells you something.

Ad accounts and datasets remain owned by the client throughout.
Client keeps admin access to the CRM for the full notice period.
Full data export delivered within a stated number of days of termination.
Tracking numbers released for porting on written request.
Domain and DNS control confirmed as the client’s at all times.
Creative source files delivered on request at the end of the term.
Google Business Profile ownership stays with the client.

How we set it up, plainly

Everything goes in your name, not ours. The ad account sits under your business portfolio, the dataset is yours, the CRM is your own sub account with your own admin login, the domain is registered to you, and the phone number is one you can port. We get access the way a vendor should get access, which is by being added to things that are not ours.

That is what the business setup package is actually for. Plenty of contractors do not have these assets set up properly yet, or have them scattered across three old logins and a personal Gmail from 2014. Building them correctly, in the company’s name, is the work.

We are not doing anyone a favor by working this way. It is the only version that survives the question at the top of this page, and we would rather be held to it. If you want the full set of questions to run on any vendor, including us, the seven questions to ask before you give an agency a dollar is the shorter list, and cost per booked estimate is the number to hold them to once they start.

One last thing about lock-in

A vendor who owns your accounts does not have to be malicious for this to hurt you. Most are not. They get busy, or they get acquired, or a person leaves and nobody knows where the logins are. Ownership is not about assuming bad faith. It is about not needing to trust anybody’s filing system with your company.

The good news is that this is the easiest thing on your list to fix. It is an afternoon of admin to prevent every problem above, and it is worth more than most of the tactics you will read about this year.

Common questions

Is it normal for an agency to run ads out of their own account?
It is common and it is still the wrong setup for you. Agencies do it because one account is easier for them to manage and because it makes the client harder to lose. The fix costs them nothing: you open the account under your own business, then add them as a partner or link them as a manager. They get the same access. You keep the asset.
What if I already signed and the accounts are in their name?
Ask for the transfer in writing while the relationship is still good, not on the way out. Meta and Google both support moving an account between owners without deleting its history, and most vendors will do it if you ask calmly and early. If the answer is no, you now know something important, and you have time to plan around it instead of scrambling.
They built my website. Do they get to keep it?
Read the agreement, because that one really can go either way. What is never negotiable is the domain: the registrar account should be in your name with your login. A site can be rebuilt in a few weeks. A domain you do not control takes your email, your reviews, your printed materials and your rankings with it.
Why does the tracking phone number matter so much?
Because it ends up printed on your trucks, your yard signs and your business cards. If that number belongs to your vendor and it cannot be ported out, leaving them means every physical thing you printed now points at a number they control. Ask whether the number ports before it goes on a vehicle wrap.
Does owning everything mean I have to manage it?
No. Ownership and operation are separate. You hold the accounts and the logins, and someone else does the work inside them. That is how it works with your accountant and your bookkeeping software, and there is no reason marketing should be different.
How do you set this up for the companies you work with?
Everything is in the contractor’s name, not ours. The ad account, the pixel, the CRM, the domain and the phone number are all opened under their business, and we get access to them the way any vendor should. If a company does not have those assets yet, building them properly is exactly what the business setup package is for. Nothing about that arrangement is generous. It is the version that holds up.

Want this run on your own setup before you sign anything with anybody? It starts with a 15-minute phone call, and you can book one here. We will walk your four accounts with you.

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