Switching Ad Agencies? A Transition Checklist for Accounts, Tracking and Approvals

If you are switching advertising agencies, settle three things before the new team makes a single change: your business holds top-level access to every ad and tracking account, you have exported the history you would otherwise lose, and everyone agrees on a cutover date and what "working" means. Most painful transitions are not strategy problems. They are access, data and timing problems discovered after the old agency is gone.

Use the checklist below with your current agency still on the account. It is easier to fix ownership while everyone is cooperative.

1. Confirm who owns each account

Make a list of every account that touches your ads, then check who holds the highest level of access. The goal is simple: your business should be able to remove any agency without losing the account.

Google Ads has a detail that surprises many advertisers: if an agency's manager account created your Google Ads account, that manager automatically becomes the account's owner. An owner manager can invite and remove users and transfer ownership. Your account still owns its data and can unlink the manager, but you need an Admin user of your own to do it.

Meta works on a similar principle. Only the business portfolio that owns an asset, such as an ad account or Page, can share it with another business, and if an agency shares an asset with you, you are limited to the permissions the agency assigned. If your ad account lives in the agency's portfolio rather than yours, agree with them how it will be handed over before the relationship ends.

Google Tag Manager's help center is blunter: it recommends at least two administrators and says the account should be managed by someone in your organization, not an external agency.

2. Export what you would otherwise lose

Ask for these before the old agency's access ends:

• Change history. Google Ads keeps account, campaign and ad group changes for two years, including who made each change. Export the period you care about.
• Search term reports and negative keyword lists.
• Audience and remarketing list definitions.
• Conversion action definitions: what counts as a lead or sale, and where each one is recorded.
• Approved creative, copy and destination URLs, with the date each version was approved.
• The last few monthly reports, plus a note on how each metric was defined.

3. Write down what "working" means

Before the new team starts, record a baseline for the last 8–12 weeks: weekly spend, qualified leads or sales, cost per qualified result, and any weeks that looked unusual. Agree which conversion actions count. If the old and new teams define a lead differently, the first month of reporting will look like a change in performance when it is really a change in definition.

4. Plan the cutover

• Pick a cutover date and decide who is allowed to edit campaigns before and after it.
• Decide which campaigns keep running unchanged during the handover.
• Confirm the payment method and budget caps in the account, not only in the contract.
• Remove the old agency's access after the cutover date and confirm the new team can see everything they need.

5. Give the new team an audit window before a rebuild

A new manager will usually want to restructure. Ask for a written audit first: what they found, what they will change, and in what order. Agree that every change gets a short reason in a change log. Avoid changing conversion goals, bidding and campaign structure in the same week; if results move, nobody will know why.

6. Agree on approvals

Decide who approves creative and who authorizes spend. An approved ad and an approved launch are separate decisions. If you use a platform as well as an agency, the agency platform checklist covers how to test the approval step before moving client work. Before anything relaunches, the campaign launch checklist is a useful final pass.

Transition worksheet

Example: a handover gap

Here is an illustrative example, not a customer story. A clinic replaces its agency and the new team cannot edit the Google Ads account. The agency's manager account created it years ago and still owns it. The clinic's office manager has read-only access. The fix is not complicated, but it needs the old agency's cooperation to grant Admin access or transfer ownership, which is why this check comes first.

If you are moving to a platform instead of an agency

Ask a software platform the same questions you would ask an agency: whose account the ads run in, who can see spend, and what you can export if you leave. Adessa launches campaigns on supported managed channels without client ad-account setup, and connects a client-owned account on other channels; reports export to PDF and CSV. Ask us the same ownership questions you would ask anyone else. Agencies evaluating Adessa can start with the agency overview.

Sources

Checked October 27, 2026:

• Google Ads Help: About ownership of client accounts, About access levels and About change history
• Google Analytics Help: Add, edit, and delete users
• Tag Manager Help: Managing users and permissions
• Meta Business Help Center: Give a partner access to business assets and Add people to a business portfolio and assign a business asset