who owns your accounts when the agency leaves?

You should own every account a marketing agency works in: your domain, website, ad accounts, social profiles, analytics and email tools. The agency should be a user with management access, never the owner. When the agreement ends, it removes itself or drops to a lower role, and you keep everything, history included. If an agency holds the owner role on any of these, you are borrowing your own marketing.

This is the full answer to question 3 in our list of questions to ask before hiring a marketing agency. It covers what to own, how to check, and what a clean handover looks like.

what you should own

For each item, owning means one thing: the owner or admin role is held by a company email address that you control, not by the agency and not by one person’s private login.

• Domain and DNS. The domain is registered in your name, with your email as the registrant and recovery contact.
• Website hosting and CMS. You hold the admin login for the host and the content system, and you can see who else has access.
• Search Console and analytics. You are an owner on both, so the data stays when the agency goes.
• Google Business Profile. You are the primary owner of the listing.
• Ad accounts. Google Ads, Meta ad accounts and LinkedIn Campaign Manager sit in your business, and the payment method on them is yours.
• Social profiles and pages. The business account that owns each page is yours, and page admin roles belong to company emails.
• Email, CRM and form tools. The account is in your name, and the contact lists live there.
• Tag manager and tracking. The container and every pixel belong to your account.
• Content and design files. You hold the final files and the editable source files, not just exported images.
• Data. Leads, audiences and conversion history all stay in accounts you own.

how to check today

You can do this in an afternoon, before any dispute.

1. For each account above, open the users or roles page and note who holds the owner or admin role.
2. Check who receives the billing emails and whose card is on file.
3. Check whose email is the recovery address, and whose phone receives the login codes.
4. Write the results into one list: account, owner, agency role, recovery contact.

Anything where the agency is the owner, or where a person who has since left is the owner, goes to the top of the fix list.

what a clean handover looks like

A good handover is boring. It has five parts:

1. A written list of every account, login location and current role holder.
2. Admin roles moved back to your company emails before anything is removed.
3. The agency removed or downgraded, as you choose.
4. Passwords rotated and shared logins replaced with named users.
5. A fixed deadline, so it does not drift.

This is how we do it at Brellix. You own the accounts and content throughout, we hold management access only, and we hand admin control back within 14 days of the end date. Paid campaigns run on your own ad account, so spend and history stay yours. For web development, you receive the source, credentials and deployment documentation at launch.

common traps

• An ad account opened inside the agency’s business manager. The history and audiences may not be movable, and you start from zero.
• A domain registered in the agency’s name. It looks convenient until you need to move it.
• Content held back for a release fee. Files you paid for should not need a second payment.
• Personal profiles as page admins. If that person leaves the agency, access leaves with them.
• One shared login. Nobody can tell who did what, and you cannot remove one person safely.

what to write into the contract

Put these in the agreement, not in an email:

• You own all accounts, content and data created for you, throughout and after the term.
• The agency has management access only, set up in your business accounts.
• Handover happens within a stated number of days of the end date, with a written account list.
• No fee applies to handing back accounts, files or source material.
• Spend is paid on your own accounts and payment methods.

How the agency is paid also affects how clean an exit is; see retainer vs commission. This is general guidance, not legal advice, so have a lawyer check your contract.

If you want to see how we set this up for a new client, ask us about our handover terms.