Google Ads account handover from an agency: 14-day plan

You’ve just switched Google Ads agencies, or you’re about to, and the account is now your problem. The temptation is to log in on day one and fix everything. My advice runs the other way: the first two weeks are for securing control, checking measurement and understanding what’s inside the account, not for optimising it. Changing bids or structure mid-handover is the quickest way to end up, a month later, with no idea whether performance dropped because of the agency, because of the exit or because of you.

This post is the plan I follow when I take over a Google Ads account from an agency, day by day. It doesn’t repeat two articles I’ve already written. I’ve covered which contract clauses to check before signing, and whose name should be on the account, in how to choose a PPC agency or freelancer without lock-in. The full step-by-step review is in the guide to auditing your Google Ads account. This one covers only the handover window.

In 30 seconds:

• Days 1 and 2: get admin access on a company email address. Without it, everything else depends on the agency.
• Before you unlink the agency’s manager account (MCC), check billing and measurement: if that MCC pays on monthly invoicing, the account stops serving when you unlink it.
• Conversions that live in the agency’s MCC stop recording new clicks after unlinking. Set them up in your own account first.
• Turn off or review auto-applied recommendations, and read the change history, which goes back two years.
• Leave bidding and structure alone until day 14. Every bid strategy change sends it back into learning.

The 14-day plan at a glance

Here’s the whole sequence before the detail. The order matters more than any single task, because some steps break things if you do them too early.

Days	Goal	What you do	What you don’t do
1-2	Control	Your own admin access, asset inventory, GTM, GA4 and Merchant Center	Unlink the agency’s MCC
3-5	Measurement	Status of every conversion action, primary vs secondary, cross-account conversions	Change the bid strategy
3-7	Context	Change history, auto-applied recommendations, agency notes	Pause “odd” campaigns you don’t understand yet
6-10	Spend	Search terms, budget pacing, billing	Restructure campaigns or ad groups
11-14	Decision	Documented baseline, orderly unlinking, change plan	Roll out the whole plan at once

Days 1 and 2: do you actually control your Google Ads account?

Step one isn’t looking at metrics. It’s checking which email you log in with and what access level it has. Plenty of companies that “have access” to their Google Ads account are really getting in through an agency user, or with an access level that doesn’t let them do anything that matters.

Google Ads has five access levels, and only one lets you run the account (Google Ads Help):

Level	What it allows	Enough for a handover?
Admin	Everything, including granting and removing access and managing links	Yes
Standard	Edit campaigns and reports, but not manage users	No
Read only	View campaigns and billing, no changes	No
Billing	Edit payment details	No
Email only	Receive notifications and reports	No

In Google’s words, an admin “can give account access, change access levels, and cancel invitations from other users”. If your email isn’t at that level, ask the agency to grant it before any other conversation. And make it a company address, not the personal one of someone who might leave next year.

Ownership and the MCC: check it, but don’t unlink yet

A client account can only have one owner, and if the agency created the account from its MCC, that manager account is the owner. The good news comes from the same documentation: “the client account still owns its data and has the ability to remove ownership access by unlinking” (Google Ads Help). Any user with admin access to either the client account or the manager account can do the unlinking (Google Ads Help).

So why not unlink on day one? Because unlinking has side effects that Google spells out on that same page:

• If the account is on monthly invoicing and the manager account you unlink is the paying manager, “the account will stop serving after you unlink it”.
• Remarketing lists that rely on the manager account’s shared tag stop populating, and the account loses access to its shared lists. Ad groups using them stop running.
• If conversions are measured with the manager account’s cross-account conversion tag, that tag stops recording conversions for clicks that happen after the unlink. Earlier clicks keep converting through their conversion window, which is why the gap only shows up a few days later.

The scenario I always want to avoid goes like this: someone unlinks with the best of intentions on a Friday, and by Monday the account isn’t serving, or Smart Bidding has spent three days bidding without seeing a single conversion. That’s why unlinking sits at the end of the plan, not the start.

The message I send the agency on day one

Before touching anything, I email the agency with these requests. In writing, so there’s a record of what was asked and when:

1. Admin access for a company email address in Google Ads, Tag Manager, GA4 and Merchant Center.
2. The account’s payment method, and whether it’s invoiced through their MCC.
3. Which conversion actions are primary, whether they were created in the account or in their MCC, and which tag fires each one.
4. Which audiences or remarketing lists come from their MCC.
5. Any scripts, automated rules and auto-applied recommendations that are switched on.
6. Tests or experiments in progress.
7. And one closing request: no further changes to the account unless we agree them.

That last point is the one people forget. Without it, you can find last-minute changes in the history that nobody explained.

The inventory you build on day 2

List every asset with its ID and who is listed as admin. It’s the same inventory I recommend before signing, only now you’re doing it under time pressure:

• Google Tag Manager. Google recommends at least two active administrators, and warns that an account with no administrator is deleted automatically, leaving 30 days to export from the trash (Tag Manager Help). Add your email as an administrator before the agency removes its people.
• Google Analytics 4. You need the Administrator role to manage users; at account level, that access extends to every property in the account (Analytics Help). If the property sits in the agency’s Analytics account, moving it comes with conditions, which I covered in the post on choosing a provider.
• Merchant Center, if you sell online. There’s a little-known trap here: if you remove the person who verified the website, “you’ll also lose your verification status (and subsequently your claim status)” and have to redo it with someone else (Merchant Center Help). Verify with your own user before removing the agency’s.
• Payments profile. Note the payment method on the account and whose name it’s in. If the agency pays, switching billing is the first job of week two.

Days 3 to 5: does the account measure what you think it measures?

If measurement is broken, every decision you make afterwards rests on bad data. And a handover gives it more reasons than usual to break: tags living in the agency’s container, conversions created in its MCC, integrations nobody documented.

Go to Goals > Conversions and check the status of each action. These are the three statuses that matter most in a handover, as Google defines them (documented in the Search Ads 360 help for Google Ads conversion actions: Search Ads 360 Help):

Status	What it means	What I do during the handover
Recording conversions	Google has seen the tag and recorded conversions in the last 7 days	Confirm the action measures something the business cares about
No recent conversions	The tag is seen, but no conversions in 7 days	Run a test conversion before drawing conclusions
Tag inactive	Google no longer sees the tag	Check whether the tag lived in the agency’s container

An inactive action that’s still set as primary is your first red flag.

Next, check which actions are primary and which are secondary. This decides which signal the algorithm bids on. Primary actions are included in the Conversions column and used for bidding; secondary ones only appear in “All conversions” and aren’t used for bidding (Google Ads Help). I often find inherited accounts where a click on the phone number, a contact-page visit or a GA4 micro-conversion counts as primary right alongside the sale. The agency reported a lovely CPA. The business couldn’t find those customers anywhere.

The third check is where those actions live. If the account uses cross-account conversion tracking and the actions were created in the agency’s MCC, you need to build equivalents in your own account and let them record in parallel before you unlink. Once you’ve got a week of matching data, switch which ones are primary. That way the algorithm is never flying blind.

Finally, run a real test conversion. Fill in the form or place a small order and check it shows up. Ten minutes of work that saves you weeks of doubt.

Days 3 to 7: what has the agency been doing lately?

There are two places where the account keeps a record of what the agency did, and I always check them alongside measurement.

Change history

Change history shows who changed what and when: paused campaigns, added keywords, previous budgets. It covers the past 2 years, and the User column shows the email address behind each change, while automated changes appear under system names (Google Ads Help).

What I’m looking for is patterns. When was the bid strategy last changed? Were there weeks without a single human change? Did the budget go up right before the contract renewal? How many changes are signed by a system rather than a person? That last question leads straight to the next point.

Auto-applied recommendations

Google Ads can apply recommendations without anyone approving them, if someone switched that option on. The list of what can be applied automatically includes adjusting CPA and ROAS targets, moving to Maximize conversions, adding broad match keywords, expanding to search partners and turning on targeting expansion (Google Ads Help). In other words, it can change your bids, your keywords and where your ads appear.

In the Recommendations section you’ll find the auto-apply settings, the queue of what’s about to be applied and a History tab with recently applied recommendations; each applied change also shows up in change history. My rule during a handover is simple: I turn off auto-apply for anything touching bidding, keywords or targeting for these two weeks. Yes, that’s a change. But it’s the one that stops the account changing itself while you’re trying to understand it. If something automatic was working, you can switch it back on deliberately later.

Why shouldn’t you touch bidding in the first week?

Because every change restarts learning, and mid-handover you can’t afford to lose your reference point.

Google explains this in its documentation on the “Learning” status: it appears when a strategy is created or reactivated, when a strategy setting changes, and when campaigns, ad groups or keywords are added or removed (Google Ads Help). On duration, the dedicated page says it can take a few conversion cycles (1-2 typically) for the strategy to recalibrate (Google Ads Help).

If your conversion cycle is a week, a CPA target change on day 3 leaves you with muddied data well into the following month. And if you also unlink the MCC and swap primary conversions that same month, there’s no way left to tell what caused what. I’ve covered when Smart Bidding makes sense and when it doesn’t in my practical Smart Bidding guide. For the handover, this is all you need: measure properly first, bid later.

Days 6 to 10: search terms, budget and billing

With control secured and measurement checked, you can finally look at where the money goes. Still without changing anything, except the obvious.

Search terms. Pull the last 60 or 90 days and look for spend on searches that have nothing to do with your business. Adding clear negatives is one of the few changes I do make in week one, because it doesn’t touch the bid strategy and it cuts spend without ambiguity. The full method, with the filters I use every week, is in my post on the Google Ads search terms report.

Budget pacing. Compare actual daily spend with the budget that’s set. Keep in mind how it works: a campaign can spend up to twice its average daily budget on a given day, but by the end of the month it won’t have spent more than 30.4 times that daily budget (Google Ads Help). One expensive day isn’t a bug. A month that always falls short, or budget-limited campaigns nobody looked at, does tell you something.

Billing. If the agency was paying, now’s the time to set up your own payment method, and to do it before unlinking their MCC. It’s the one task in the plan with immediate consequences if you do it in the wrong order.

What shouldn’t you change in the first week?

This is the hardest list to stick to, because everything in an inherited account looks improvable. It probably is. Just not yet.

Change	Why wait	When it’s fine
Bid strategy or targets	Restarts learning and wipes your baseline	After day 14, with validated measurement
Restructuring campaigns or ad groups	Changes the bid strategy’s composition	With a written plan and a week of clean data
Pausing campaigns you don’t understand	Could be brand, remarketing or something propping up volume	Once change history explains why they exist
Changing primary conversions	Bidding loses its signal or gets a different one	When the new actions have been recording in parallel for days
Unlinking the agency’s MCC	Billing, audiences and cross-account conversions	Days 11 to 14, with everything above sorted
Rewriting ads	You lose the record of which message worked	Later, with structured tests

What you can do from the start: clear negatives, fixing a broken link, repairing a conversion that isn’t recording, and removing agency users who shouldn’t be there any more, always after you have your own admin access.

Days 11 to 14: baseline, unlinking and plan

The last days of the plan are about closing the handover in order.

First, document the baseline: spend, primary conversions, CPA or ROAS per campaign over the last four weeks, with measurement already validated. It becomes the reference for everything you change afterwards. Without it, your first month of running the account yourself can’t be judged.

Second, unlink the MCC, if needed, with billing already in your name, your own conversions recording and any audiences that depended on the MCC replaced with lists you own. Then remove any agency users still holding direct access.

Third, write the change plan in order of impact. This is where the full audit comes in. With two weeks of context, the eight steps of the audit I linked at the start go much faster and throw up fewer false positives.

When to bring in a consultant when switching Google Ads agencies?

It isn’t always necessary. If your account has only a few campaigns, the agency is cooperating and someone on your team knows Google Ads, you can follow this plan in-house.

I do recommend it in three situations. When the agency isn’t cooperating or is slow to hand over access, because the order of the steps becomes critical and it helps if someone has done it before. When measurement depends on the agency’s MCC or container, because migrating conversions without breaking bidding is the most delicate technical part. And when nobody in-house will run the account afterwards, because then the handover is also about choosing who will.

In those cases I work as a Google Ads consultant for the handover: I work with admin access inside your account, not mine, follow this plan and leave you with the baseline and the change plan documented.

Frequently asked questions

Can I remove the agency from my Google Ads account myself?

Yes, if you have admin access to the account. Google says a user with admin access to the client account can unlink the manager account, even if it’s the owner. Before you do, make sure billing doesn’t depend on that MCC and your conversions aren’t measured with its cross-account tag.

Will I lose the account history when I switch agency?

No, if the account is yours and you only unlink the MCC. Campaigns, metrics and change history stay in your account. What you lose are the things that live in the MCC: shared lists and cross-account conversions, which stop recording new clicks. If the agency ran your ads from its own account, though, that history stays with them.

How long should I wait before changing the bid strategy?

I wait at least until measurement is validated and there’s a clean baseline, which in this plan is day 14. Google says recalibration after a change typically takes one or two conversion cycles, so the longer your sales cycle, the more it costs to change bidding mid-handover.

What happens to the recommendations the agency had set to auto-apply?

They keep applying until someone turns auto-apply off. Review the history of applied recommendations, switch off the ones affecting bidding, keywords and targeting during the handover, and later turn back on only those that make sense for your business.

Should I ask the agency for a handover report?

Yes, in writing, on day one alongside the access request: which conversion actions are active and why, which audiences or lists come from its MCC, which scripts or automated rules were running and which tests were in progress. Compare it with what the change history tells you. If the two match, the handover will be a calm one.

Two weeks that protect the next year

A Google Ads account changing hands doesn’t get damaged by what the previous agency did. It gets damaged in the two weeks after, when someone unlinks too early, changes bids before validating measurement or pauses what they don’t understand. Stick to the order (control, measurement, context, spend, decision) and you reach day 15 with an account that’s genuinely yours and data you can trust.

If you’re in the middle of a handover, or about to start one, book a 30-minute call and we’ll go through access, measurement and the unlinking order together before anything gets touched.

Sources

1. Google Ads Help. About access levels in your Google Ads account. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9978556
2. Google Ads Help. Manager Accounts (MCC): About ownership of client accounts. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7456532
3. Google Ads Help. About unlinking accounts from your manager account. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7458428
4. Tag Manager Help. Managing users and permissions. support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/6107011
5. Analytics Help. Add, edit, and delete Analytics users and user groups. support.google.com/analytics/answer/9305788
6. Merchant Center Help. Manage people and access levels in Merchant Center. support.google.com/merchants/answer/12160472
7. Search Ads 360 Help. Check the tracking status of your Google Ads conversion action. support.google.com/sa360/answer/9780742
8. Google Ads Help. Manage conversion goals from the conversions summary. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10993988
9. Google Ads Help. About change history. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/19888
10. Google Ads Help. About applying recommendations automatically. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10279006
11. Google Ads Help. About bid strategy statuses. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6263057
12. Google Ads Help. Duration of the learning period for campaigns and what affects it. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/13020501
13. Google Ads Help. About overdelivery and your average daily budget. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1704443