Navigating Transitions with Google Ads Management Agencies

[00:00:57] Caitlin: Hi, thanks for having me.

[00:00:57] Janet: Fantastic. In the last episode, we talked about everything you need to know about digital marketing for home improvement, especially if you’re considering purchasing another home improvement company to expand your geographic or service footprint. We discussed going through due diligence and the questions you need to ask related to the company’s digital marketing situation.

So, kind of on that same thread, today we’re talking about what you need to consider if you’re transitioning agencies. Say you have an existing paid search account, whether it’s a Google Ads account or a Bing Ads account, and you’re working with an agency—or maybe, like we talked about in the last episode, you just bought a company and need to go through a management transition.

Caitlin, why don’t you talk us through that? What are some of the best practices, warning signs, red flags, and things we’ve encountered when helping a client manage a transition, whether we’re taking over from their current agency, or our client is telling us it’s time to part ways and we have to hand over the keys to another agency?

[00:02:00] Caitlin: Absolutely. It’s a good point to make that Janet, on the sales side, gets this question quite a bit as clients look to make a transition. They want to make sure it will be smooth, so I’ll talk through how that’s going to work.

First and foremost, the way we’re set up here—and I think most agencies should be set up if they’re running Google Ads accounts and managing them—is through an MCC, which is a Manager Account. It’s the mothership of Google Ads, allowing you to have multiple accounts of different businesses within that one account. So, Janet, tell the listener, what is this MCC account? Is that ours or the company’s?

[00:02:47] Janet: That would be the agency’s. The agency stores access to at least 20 of the accounts they manage within this MCC. This setup allows the agency to swiftly transition if they need to, from client to client. But also, if you decide you want to leave or need to add another marketing manager or user to the account, the agency should be able to do that. So, the first step is to ensure you have access to your Google Ads account. It’s most likely within an MCC, which is totally fine. You won’t be able to see the other accounts in that MCC, just your own, but make sure you have access. There’s no reason not to have full transparency about ad spend and what’s going on.

[00:03:43] Caitlin: So, even if you don’t care about the dirty details, you’re saying listeners should have a username and password for their Google Ads account, even if they’re paying an agency to manage it?

[00:04:31] Janet: Yes, absolutely. It’s most likely your money being spent, and the bottom line is you should be able to log in at any point to see what’s going on. We highly recommend—and I know we differ from many agencies on this—that it’s your account to own. You should be able to add whoever you want, and it’s your data, which brings us to the next step.

[00:05:11] Caitlin: Yeah, that’s something I deal with as an account manager here at Fat Cat, and Janet does all the sales. I’m at the beginning of these conversations with new clients, and that’s something that comes up when I’m talking to a prospect. They often ask, “How do I know this is going to be a smooth transition? I’m not happy with my current agency. I need to hand the keys off to you guys. What does that look like?”

And that brings us to the point you just made, Janet. The very first question I’m going to ask is, “Do you own your Google Ads account?” Because some agencies work differently than we do, and the client—the owner of the home improvement company—might not actually own their Google Ads account.

[00:05:53] Janet: Yes, the agency does. And when you stop working with them, you lose that account. I don’t understand why agencies wouldn’t allow the owner of a business to own their Google Ads account, but it happens, and it happens frequently. We’ve seen many instances where, unfortunately, we have to start from scratch. We have to rebuild an entirely new Google Ads account because the home improvement company wasn’t able to regain access to the account. So, what does it mean to start over?

[00:06:43] Caitlin: First and foremost, you’ve lost all your historical data. That’s the biggest issue. We’re basically starting from scratch, using best practices that any agency would bring in for managing a Google Ads account. They’re going to apply that to whether it’s an existing account or a new one. But now, you’re building out brand new campaigns, brand new keywords, brand new ads. You’re setting up your Google Ads account from the ground up. You’ll also need to build out tracking phone numbers, connect your website, and integrate your Google Business Profile to ensure your reviews and locations are properly connected.

[00:07:32] Janet: Wait, wait, wait. So, if I’m a listener and I own a roofing company, are you telling me that if I decide to switch agencies that have been managing my ads, it could affect my reviews?

[00:08:14] Caitlin: Yes. I’m not trying to scare you away from switching agencies if it’s not working out, but because your Google Ads account is connected to your Google Business Profile—or at least it should be—it can affect how your reviews and business location are highlighted in ads. So, yes, it’s connected.

[00:08:14] Janet: You mentioned Google Business Profile. What is that?

[00:08:14] Caitlin: That’s where your reviews are. The moment you start to touch your Google Ads account, you’re touching pretty much everything Google-related—your Google Business Profile, your Google Analytics account, and even your Google Search Console.

[00:09:02] Janet: And your YouTube account is also connected to your Google Ads. So, making the transition might sound painful, but with the right agency and proper communication, there’s a good process in place. You should have a checklist to follow, and the agency should be asking you for access to all those things as you make the transition, assuming you’re not getting the existing account.

[00:09:55] Janet: You’ve decided to hire a marketing person who’s going to manage your ads. So it’s a good transition. You’ve got a good agency partner, and they are happy for your growth. Everyone is going to be an adult in the room. In that scenario, which I’ll call Scenario A, the agency you’re parting ways with understands that not everything lasts forever. They’re happy to hand over passwords and have you take ownership of the account. You’ll keep all your historical data, and you don’t need to worry about the connections to Google. It’s seamless—everyone parts as friends, and you shake hands. That’s Scenario A.

[00:10:42] Caitlin: Yes. But then there’s Scenario B. For whatever reason, either the agency doesn’t want to play nice, or in their terms and conditions from day one, they told you, “Hey, you don’t own this ad account. We do.” They may not come out and tell you that, so you need to check the terms and conditions. They probably didn’t mention this during the sales process, but especially with some of the bigger players in this industry, they might say they have proprietary software or ad management methods. They claim their methodology and keywords are proprietary, and so when you leave, you don’t get to take your ad account with you. So, that’s Scenario B, which we’ll call complicated.

[00:11:23] Janet: Exactly. In that Scenario B, you’re facing the reality of starting with a new ad account.

[00:11:28] Caitlin: Yes, and in both Scenario A or B, you’re still going to need access to all of those profiles, no matter what. Starting from Scenario A is smoother and obviously faster. Scenario B is something we’ve dealt with time and time again, and you just have to pack your patience and set aside 45 to 60 days for Google to even recognize that you’ve got a new account running content.

[00:12:17] Janet: That’s a good point. Now, let’s talk about something else that comes up—can we just run two Google Ads accounts at the same time?

[00:12:24] Caitlin: Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you brought this up. No, you can’t. That’s a definitive “No.” Period. End of story.

[00:12:32] Janet: So, let me translate what you just said. A client comes to us and says, “Hey, I’m going to have two agencies manage two different ad accounts, driving ads to the same domain name, and let them compete against each other.” What do you think? And to that, Caitlin, you say, “Hell no.”

[00:12:49] Caitlin: Yeah. It’s not just us being protective of our agency work—Google doesn’t allow it. If you Google it right now, “Can I run two Google Ads accounts at the same time?” the first thing that pops up is: You risk getting permanently suspended from running any ad account ever, forever, to that domain.

[00:13:08] Janet: Right, to that URL, to your website.

[00:13:12] Caitlin: So, I just want to hit that point home again. As the person who handles sales, I see this kind of thinking a lot. It’s not necessarily bad thinking. I’m a big pro-capitalist, and I understand the instinct to say, “Hey, I’m going to pit these two agencies together and see which one wins.” On a logical front, there’s some validity to that, but it’s a violation of Google’s ad platform terms and conditions. If you rely on generating leads through paid search and you try that trick, you could cut yourself off at the knees and end up in a situation where you’re permanently banned from ever running Google Ads to your website at that domain again.

[00:14:08] Janet: I will say, we have been in a few situations where we, again, are not recommending this, but we have played nice. We’ve shared a Google Ads account for one company, for one website, with another agency, and we just divided and conquered. We managed a certain set of campaigns, and they managed a different set. Not ideal, but it worked. That’s better than having the agencies try to run two different accounts. Please don’t. Please, please, please don’t. I’m telling you this from real-life experience—we’ve had to untangle an account that was suspended for this reason.

[00:15:08] Caitlin: Yes, that’s a great point. Another important tactic to discuss is how to prevent alerting your current agency if you’re considering switching.

[00:15:48] Janet: This is the kind of conversation I have when talking to a prospective client. They’re grilling me about what Fat Cat does, and they might be working with an agency but aren’t happy with them. They worry about what’s going to happen if they tell their current agency they’re thinking about switching—will the agency just shut everything down? That’s definitely a legitimate scenario and fear. It depends on the relationship you have with whoever is currently managing your ads, whether that’s an individual freelancer or an agency. If there’s not a lot of trust, and it is about trust and about adults being in the room, then here’s what we recommend:

Create a new email address at your domain name, something innocuous like marketing@mycompany.com. Contact your current agency and tell them, “Hey, we’re doing a little bit of cleanup. We want to get everything under one login. Will you please add this user to our current Google Ads or Bing Ads account with administrative privileges?” That should not raise any red flags for your agency—it’s just you asking for access to your own account with a new user. Then you take that new user, which doesn’t have any private information about your company that you don’t want to share, and give that to the new agency you’re talking to.

[00:17:25] Caitlin: Now the new agency can log in and stealthily dig around without alerting your current agency. The username marketing@yourcompany.com won’t raise any alarms.

[00:17:48] Janet: Because let me tell you what happens if you get on a sales call with another agency and you give that new agency login access to your current ads account. Caitlin, you know what happens.

[00:18:00] Caitlin: The current agency gets an immediate alert that there’s a new user on that account. Then your current agency sees that the new user has competitoragency.com as an email address. If you were worried about alerting your current agency and what they might do—well, Google already did it for you, and they did it in a pretty awkward way.

[00:18:17] Janet: Yes, and now the conversations you have with your current agency will be kind of defensive and tense. So that’s definitely a Scenario B situation—complicated and kind of gross. But let’s talk about Scenario A, where everyone is polite and professional.

[00:18:45] Caitlin: Yes, and honestly, what we encounter more often is the polite, professional handoff.

[00:18:50] Janet: So, what does the polite, professional handoff look like?

[00:18:55] Caitlin: It goes back to what I mentioned earlier. Usually, what’s going to happen is your current agency will be able to transition your account into another agency’s MCC. They will give you information about what email to add, what account ID to use, and all of that. That is the most smooth, professional, seamless, and non-dramatic way to handle it.

[00:19:11] Janet: So we’re using this term “MCC.” Would you agree that “umbrella account” is a good way to describe it?

[00:19:20] Caitlin: Yes, the umbrella account is what the agency has, and they have all their clients under that umbrella. What we’re saying is that in this smooth transition, both agencies are communicating with each other, and your Google Ads account gets moved from one umbrella account to another.

[00:19:35] Janet: That’s right. In fact, I like to think that most of the time, I’m the adult in the room. Like I said at the top of this podcast, we’ve been on both sides of this. We’ve inherited accounts from other agencies, and we’ve passed them off when clients decided it was time to switch gears.

[00:19:58] Caitlin: And when that happens, the best thing you can do is to do an email introduction between the two agencies and let them work out the technical details.

[00:20:06] Janet: Absolutely. That’s what we encounter in most instances because we know what we want, what we need, and what we need to hand off.

[00:20:15] Caitlin: A professional agency isn’t going to want you to lose all of that data, the audiences you’ve built, the tracking you’ve set up.

[00:20:25] Janet: Yes, the tracking pixels, remarketing audiences, and campaign data—maybe 10-plus years of ad budget spend and results. You don’t want to lose that.

[00:20:40] Caitlin: So, you really want to strive for that Scenario A—the nice, good, smooth, professional handoff. But just keep in mind, there are both sides to it.

[00:20:50] Janet: There are, and I hope this podcast helps you be prepared for the opportunities and challenges.

We’ve created a checklist of items to consider if you are currently working with an agency managing a paid search account and are either thinking of bringing that in-house or switching to another agency. If you go to fatcatstrategies.com, to our resources section, we have a PDF checklist that’s free to download. We encourage you to check it out, and we hope you find it useful.

[00:21:25] Caitlin: We also hope that you found this episode useful and that you’ll join us for a future one.

[00:21:30] Janet: Thank you for listening.

[00:21:32] Caitlin: Thank you. And don’t forget to go to fatcatstrategies.com and download the checklist about PPC transitions.

[00:21:39] Janet: Thank you, guys. See you in another episode. Bye.

[00:21:43] Narrator: Digital Marketing for Contractors is created by Fat Cat Strategies. For more information, visit fatcatstrategies.com.