Why you should always have access to your own ad account

When someone hires an agency to run their ads, almost nobody asks something that should be obvious: does the Google Ads or Meta Ads account end up in my name, or the agency's?

There's a real, documented case of a business owner who spent thousands of dollars on campaigns without any access to his own account, not even read-only. He only got to log in and see what had been happening after ending the relationship with the agency. Before that, he depended entirely on what they reported to him, with no way to verify anything on his own.

This isn't a minor technicality. The ad account holds the full history of your campaigns: what worked, which audiences responded, which creatives converted best. If that account belongs to the agency and not to you, losing that provider means losing all of that accumulated learning too, and starting over with the next one.

The question worth asking before signing is simple: is the account created under my business's name, with admin access for me from day one? If the answer is vague, or the agency prefers to run everything from its own account "for convenience", that's a signal worth paying attention to.

Having access doesn't mean you have to check metrics daily. It means the information and the history are yours, no conditions attached, and if you ever decide to switch providers, you leave with what you already built.

It's literally how we work by default at Ierònne: we almost always run campaigns by logging directly into the client's own account, with their own credentials, unless they'd rather we didn't.