Delegating the management of your campaigns is perfectly legitimate: it's a profession. Delegating ownership of your account is far less so, and yet it's common, often without the advertiser even realizing it.

Question 1: who owns the account?

If the ad account was created by the provider under its own structure, the history belongs to them. The day you switch, you start from scratch: no more performance history, no more accumulated learning, no more conversion data. Rebuilding costs several weeks of degraded results.

The right setup is simple: the account is in your name, and you grant management access. You keep ownership, and the provider keeps the access they need to do the work.

The day you change providers, you find out what you actually owned.

Question 2: who reads the results?

A report written by the person doing the work is structurally both judge and party. That isn't necessarily bad faith: it's a normal bias, since people highlight what works. The consequence is concrete: the uncomfortable questions never get asked.

An independent view doesn't replace the provider. It asks the questions nobody has an interest in asking: why is this budget increasing? Why are these search terms still being paid for? Has the real cost per customer gone down, or only the cost per click?

Question 3: what happens if you leave?

  • Does the account stay active in your name, with its history?
  • Do the landing pages created for the campaigns belong to you?
  • Is conversion tracking set up on your own installation, or on the provider's?
  • Do the audience lists built from your traffic remain accessible?

These four points can be settled in ten minutes at the start. They take months to fix afterwards.

The special case of "all-inclusive" packages

An offer that mixes media budget and service fees in a single flat rate makes it impossible to read your return: you don't know what goes to advertising and what goes to fees. Insist on a separation. It isn't a sign of distrust, it's the condition for making informed decisions.

Check before the conflict, not during it

Check today, without waiting for a dispute, who owns your ad account and where your conversion tracking is installed. If the answer isn't "me", that's the first issue to address, even before campaign performance.

You can't steer what you don't own.