Who should own your marketing accounts? Ownership, access and a clean exit

When a business hires outside help for advertising, the accounts are often set up wherever is convenient for the helper. Months later the relationship ends and the business discovers that its campaign history, its conversion tracking and sometimes even its enquiry pages belong to someone else.

Nobody needs to have acted in bad faith for this to happen. It is simply the default unless you decide otherwise at the start.

What “your accounts” should include

Ownership is more than the ad account. A complete list usually covers:

• Ad accounts on each platform, in your business name, with your payment method
• Tracking and analytics, including the conversion setup that tells the platform what counts
• Enquiry pages and forms on your own domain
• Phone numbers used for call tracking, where they can be ported or kept
• The enquiry records themselves: every request, its source and its outcome
• Notes and settings: audiences, exclusions, negative keywords and what was tried

If any of these must sit elsewhere for a technical reason, write down why and how it will be handed over.

Access levels let you give exactly what’s needed

Platforms separate owning an account from working in it. Google Ads, for example, offers several access levels. According to its help pages, Standard access can edit campaigns, while only Admin access can give account access to others, change access levels and unlink manager accounts. Billing and read-only levels are separate again.

A sensible pattern is that you hold Admin and the payment method, and anyone working for you gets the lowest level that lets them do the job. When the work ends, you remove that access yourself. You should never need to ask permission to see your own account.

Who pays the platform

When platform spend is paid by you directly, you can see exactly what was spent, and nobody can mark it up. When it passes through a provider, ask how much reaches the platform, how that is shown to you, and what happens to any balance if you leave. Both models exist; the important thing is that you know which one you’re in.

Questions to ask before anyone starts

1. Whose name and payment method will each account use?
2. What access level will you have, and what will they have?
3. Where will enquiry records be stored, and can you export them at any time?
4. If you end the arrangement, what do you keep, and how long does the handover take?
5. Is any part of the setup shared with other clients, such as a phone number pool or a landing page?

Leaving should be uneventful

A good test of any arrangement is how boring the exit would be. If ending it means removing one user from each account and receiving a short handover note, ownership was set up properly. If it means rebuilding tracking from scratch, it wasn’t.

Ring Side Leads runs programmes in accounts the client owns, for this reason. You can read how that works on the how it works page.

Sources

• Google Ads Help: About access levels in your Google Ads account, checked 2026-10-19

General information, not legal advice. Rules and programmes change; check the sources before acting.

Next: Counting duplicate enquiries: matching rules and time windows that fit your business