How to choose a PPC agency or freelancer without lock-in

Most guides on choosing a PPC agency or freelancer talk about certifications, case studies and how many accounts each person handles. All of that matters. But I’ve watched more of these relationships fall apart over something that almost never appears in the pitch deck: whose name is on your advertising and measurement accounts.

It’s the one decision in the whole process you can’t reverse when it goes wrong. You can switch provider if your CPA climbs. You can’t get back two years of conversion history if the account was never yours.

That’s what this post is about. Not whether an agency or a freelancer suits you better, which I covered in Google Ads consultant vs agency and, more broadly, in agency or marketing consultant. This is about the check beforehand that keeps that choice reversible.

In 30 seconds:

• If the agency creates your Google Ads account from their manager account, that manager becomes the owner automatically.
• A Google Ads client account can only have one owner. Everything else is access.
• Unlink a manager and its cross-account conversion tag stops recording later clicks; if that manager was the paying one, the account stops serving ads entirely.
• In Google Tag Manager, an account with no admin is deleted automatically and you get 30 days to export from the trash.
• None of this can be fixed afterwards. It gets checked before you sign.

What happens when you ask for access to your own accounts?

Last year I sat alongside two companies that wanted to change advertising provider. Neither wanted a fight. Both had asked for the same thing: access to their accounts. And both got an answer they weren’t expecting.

The first received an impeccably polite email from their provider. Here’s the fragment that matters, with names removed:

“We are unable to provide access to or transfer management of any accounts associated with our SEO and PPC services while those services remain under active contract.”

The email went on to explain that the PPC contract still had a few months to run and the SEO contract rather more than a year. Then it added the argument that comes up in every one of these cases: granting third-party access during the contracted period creates risk for both parties, because changes inside those accounts could affect the performance of the service they had committed to deliver.

Seen from outside, the reasoning holds up. Nobody wants to answer for the performance of an account somebody else is touching. The practical consequence is the problem: the company couldn’t even look at where its money was going.

The second case reached me as a far less formal message, from someone who’d spent weeks trying to work out what he was being told:

“They already told me before that they wouldn’t give me access, that they managed several accounts in a single system and it wasn’t possible, so I’m a bit lost and I don’t know what to ask these people for.”

That phrase, “I don’t know what to ask for”, is the heart of it. He didn’t know what to ask for because nobody had ever explained which assets existed, which were his and which weren’t. And when you don’t know what to ask for, any refusal sounds technical and reasonable.

Both situations have the same root, and it isn’t bad faith. Nobody ran the ownership check on day one.

Who actually owns each account?

This is where intuition fails. “My account” and “the account spending my money” aren’t the same thing, and every platform handles it differently.

Google Ads

Google puts it plainly in its manager account documentation: “A client account can only have one owner. If a manager creates a new account, the manager will automatically become the owner” (Google Ads Help).

Read that second sentence again. If the agency opened the account from their MCC, the agency owns it. Not because they negotiated for it, but because that’s how the product works. And the owner can invite users, remove users, accept or decline link requests, and transfer ownership.

There’s an important counterweight, worth knowing before you give up on the whole thing: the same page clarifies that “the client account still owns its data and has the ability to remove ownership access by unlinking”. So there is a way out. Executing it needs somebody with admin access inside the account, though, and that’s precisely the access you don’t have.

Access level isn’t a minor detail either. Only Admin “can give account access, change access levels, and cancel invitations from other users”, on top of unlinking manager accounts (Google Ads Help). Standard access lets you work. It doesn’t let you leave.

Google Analytics 4

In Analytics the asset that matters is the property, and it can be moved between accounts. With one condition: “To move a property, you need the Administrator and Editor roles for both the source and destination accounts” (Analytics Help).

Both sides. If the property lives in the agency’s Analytics account and you’re not an administrator there, there’s nothing you can do on your own.

And even when you do move it, something gets left behind. Reporting data moves, but “any change history associated with that property prior to the move remains with the source account”. Translated: you take the numbers, not the record of who changed what and when. Which is exactly what you’d need to audit the last two years of work.

Google Tag Manager

This is the one most people underestimate, and it has the most expensive failure mode. The documentation carries an explicit warning: “If a team member who is the sole administrator of your Tag Manager account changes roles, you can get locked out of your account” (Tag Manager Help).

Swap “changes roles” for “stops being your provider” and you have the real scenario.

The same page describes what happens when nobody is left as admin: “When an account or container has no admin, it will be automatically deleted. Remaining users with read access have 30 days to export their information from the trash can.”

Thirty days. If your GTM container carries the Google Ads conversion tags, the GA4 events and the Meta CAPI, those thirty days are the difference between an orderly migration and rebuilding your entire measurement setup from scratch.

Meta

Meta works on a different logic, because it separates owning an asset from having access to it. Its help centre has a page dedicated to giving a partner access to the assets in your business portfolio, and that’s the right order: the ad account, the page and the catalogue belong to your portfolio, and the agency comes in as a partner with whatever permissions it needs.

When it happens the other way round, and the asset is born inside the agency’s portfolio, getting it back stops being a five-minute job. I won’t hand you a product rule here, because Meta changes these flows often enough that they’re worth checking at the time. What I have seen consistently in migrations: some assets have a transfer request, and for others the practical way out ends up being to create a new one. Assume that when you negotiate rather than discovering it at the end.

What actually breaks the day you leave?

This is the table I walk through with anyone evaluating a proposal. The right-hand column is the one nobody mentions in the sales meeting.

Asset	If it’s yours	If it’s the provider’s
Google Ads account	You unlink the manager and carry on	They have to unlink you or grant admin access
Conversion and bidding history	Stays with you	Stays in their account
Cross-account conversion tag	Not applicable	Stops recording clicks after the unlink
Monthly invoicing via manager	Not applicable	If that manager was paying, the account stops serving ads
GA4 property	Already in your account	You need admin on both sides to move it
GA4 change history	Stays with you	Stays in the source account, always
GTM container	You control the admins	With no admin it’s deleted, and you get 30 days
Audience segments	You control them	If shared from their manager, campaigns using them stop running

Three rows deserve a note, because they catch out even experienced people.

Google’s unlinking documentation confirms that when you unlink an account that was using the manager’s cross-account conversion tag, “that tag will no longer record conversions for clicks that take place after the account was unlinked” (Google Ads Help). If your measurement depends on a tag living in the agency’s MCC, the day you leave is the day you stop measuring. It isn’t a punishment, it’s how the thing is built.

The second can take your campaigns down mid-flight: if the account is on monthly invoicing and the manager you’re unlinking was the one paying, “the account will stop serving after you unlink it”. You rebuild the billing setup before unlinking, not after.

The third is audiences. A manager can share its segments with every sub-account, and that convenience has a flip side: “If a client account turns off segment sharing, any campaign or ad groups in the other client accounts using the shared segments will stop running and will no longer be visible in your Audience manager” (Google Ads Help). If your remarketing leans on segments that aren’t yours, you’re not inheriting an audience. You’re renting one.

Which clauses decide whether you can leave?

The email in the first case wasn’t abusive. It was the literal application of what had been signed. Which is why the work happens beforehand.

Term and renewal. A twelve-month PPC contract that renews automatically is common, and it doesn’t have to be a problem. The notice period is what matters: if you have to give ninety days’ notice and renewal is automatic, you effectively get a two-week window each year to decide. Ask for thirty days’ notice and renewal by explicit agreement.

Look at how the services hook into each other, too. In the first case, SEO and PPC had different end dates, and that gap kept the company tied in for more than a year even though it only wanted to change one of the two. If you’re buying several services, give each one its own exit.

Asset ownership. The most important clause and the one that appears least often. It should say, in plain terms, that the Google Ads, Meta, Analytics and Tag Manager accounts belong to the client, and that the provider has access as a user or partner. If the agency proposes creating the accounts itself, ask why. Sometimes there’s a legitimate operational reason. Sometimes it’s the reason you’re reading this.

Then there’s the ending, which almost nobody drafts because nobody wants to think about the ending while signing the beginning. What happens on the final day, exactly: the deadline for handing back access, the format assets are delivered in, who runs the unlink and in what order. A week strikes me as a reasonable deadline. “We’ll sort it out” is not a deadline.

And there’s the clause that would have prevented that first email entirely: permanent read access for the client, for the full term, no conditions. What reason does anyone doing a good job have to object to you looking? The risk argument collapses on its own once access is read-only, because looking doesn’t break anything.

What to check before you sign

Six checks. None takes more than ten minutes, and all of them happen before signature rather than after.

1. Ask for the Google Ads account ID and verify it. If the account already exists and is yours, log in and confirm your email has admin access. If they’re going to create it, ask them to create it from your own Google account and then request the manager link.
2. Ask where the conversion actions live. In your account, or in their MCC. If the answer is their MCC, you now know what breaks the day you leave.
3. Check there are two admins on Tag Manager. One yours, one theirs. It’s Google’s own explicit recommendation, and it avoids the automatic deletion scenario.
4. Verify the GA4 property sits in an Analytics account you own, not the agency’s, and that your email has the administrator role.
5. Get read access written into the contract. Not into an email. Into the contract.
6. Ask the awkward question out loud: “If we decide to work with someone else in a year, what do I take and what stays?” The answer will tell you more than the entire portfolio. Anyone with their house in order answers in thirty seconds, in detail.

If you also want to assess the technical competence of whoever’s in front of you, not just the contractual side, it helps to know what a Google Ads consultant actually does day to day, and I broke down what each model should cost you in Google Ads consultant pricing.

What if you’re already trapped?

This is where most people who write to me are, so it’s worth being specific. There’s no trick, but there is an order that works better than improvising.

Start by asking only for read access. Don’t ask for management to be transferred, because those are two very different requests and they get confused constantly. The provider in the first email refused to transfer management during the contract, and that refusal is defensible. Refusing to let a client see their own campaigns is much harder to justify in writing, and in my experience almost nobody does when you ask for it that narrowly.

Next, get the asset list down on paper. Build it yourself: the Google Ads account with its ID, the GA4 property, the GTM container, the Meta portfolio and ad account, Search Console. Send it over and ask, asset by asset, who holds each one. A concrete list is far harder to answer vaguely than “I want my access”.

There’s a distinction that saves a lot of argument, which is separating the contractual conflict from the technical one. Whether they’ll let you move management before the contract expires is a contract discussion. Whether the conversion tag lives in their MCC is a technical fact that will still be true on the expiry date, whatever you sign. So prepare the technical migration now, while the contract is still running. You’ll thank yourself on the way out.

And the most useful of the lot: build your measurement in parallel. This needs nobody’s permission. Your own GTM container, your own GA4 property, your own Search Console. From that day you’re accumulating a history that belongs to you, and when the contract expires you don’t arrive empty-handed. It’s what I do every time I take over an inherited account, and it tends to be the difference between migrating in a week and migrating in two months.

If you need to understand what’s really inside the account before you move it, the method is in the Google Ads account audit.

Frequently asked questions

Can an agency refuse to give me access to my Google Ads account?

If the agency created the account from their manager account, that manager account is the owner and can decide who gets in. That’s a consequence of the product, not an irregularity. That said, Google’s own documentation notes that the client account still owns its data and can remove ownership access by unlinking. So the operational question isn’t whether they can refuse, it’s whether anyone on your side has admin access to carry out that unlink.

What do I lose if I leave an agency that runs my account from their MCC?

It depends where each thing lives. If the conversion actions sit in their MCC, the cross-account tag stops recording clicks that happen after the unlink. If your remarketing uses segments shared from that manager, campaigns using them stop running once sharing is switched off. GA4 change history from before the move stays with the source account. And if the manager was paying under monthly invoicing, the account stops serving ads until you rebuild the billing setup.

Is a twelve-month PPC contract normal?

It’s common, especially with agencies, and it isn’t a warning sign in itself: some work doesn’t pay off in three months. What’s worth looking at is the whole package. Twelve months with thirty days’ notice, renewal by explicit agreement, permanent read access and client ownership of the accounts is a reasonable deal. Twelve months with automatic renewal, ninety days’ notice and accounts in the provider’s name is something else.

How do I find out who owns my Google Ads account?

Log in with your own email and go to the admin and access section. That’s where you’ll see the linked manager accounts, which one is listed as owner, and what access level each user holds. If you can’t log in with your email at all, you already have your answer, and it’s the one you didn’t want.

Does hiring a freelancer avoid this problem automatically?

No. The size of the provider doesn’t determine where the accounts live. A freelancer can just as easily create your account from their manager account and leave you equally tied in. The practical difference is that there tend to be fewer layers and the conversation is more direct, but the check is exactly the same and you still have to run it.

Can I ask for read access while still under contract?

Yes, and it’s the request to start with. Read-only access doesn’t allow campaign changes, so the argument that a third party could affect the performance of the contracted service doesn’t apply. Ask for it narrowly and in writing: read access for your email, no change to who manages the account.

What you’re really choosing

When someone asks me how to choose a PPC agency or freelancer, they’re expecting an answer about technical competence. And competence matters, of course it does.

But there’s an asymmetry worth seeing before you sign: mediocre work shows up within three months and gets fixed by changing provider. The account that was never yours doesn’t show up until the day you try to leave, and by then there’s no fix available.

The good news is that the check is short. Six questions, ten minutes, before signature. Anyone with their house in order answers them without flinching. Anyone who gets defensive has just handed you the most valuable information in the entire sales process.

If you’re weighing up a proposal right now and want to go through what it says about access and ownership together, book 30 minutes and we’ll look at it before you sign. And if what you’re after is someone who works inside your accounts rather than their own, that’s how I set up PPC and SEM consulting.