What to hand over when you change ad managers

That first item is the one that catches people. Many agencies build campaigns inside their own manager account. When you leave, the history leaves with them, and the new manager begins with no conversion data, no learning, and no record of which keywords ever produced a customer.

Check this while you are happy with your current manager, not while you are leaving. It is a five-minute check and an awkward conversation at the wrong time.

What exactly do I need to own?

Six things. Go through them one at a time and confirm each is under an email address you control, at the right access level.

The Google Ads account. Your account, your billing, your admin. Google publishes what each access level can do, and the differences are load bearing. Only Admin can give account access, change access levels, accept and reject manager account link requests, unlink manager accounts, add or remove product links, and link the account to Google Analytics to import conversions. Standard access can edit campaigns and nothing on that list. If you hold standard access on your own account, you do not control it.

Google adds a warning worth quoting in substance: if your account has only one administrator, you may lose access to your tags if that user becomes unavailable, and it recommends adding at least one additional administrator. Google surfaces this in Tag Diagnostics. The single-admin agency account is the exact configuration that warning describes.

Analytics. Admin on the property, not view access.

Tag manager, if one is in use. This is where conversion tags live and it is commonly forgotten.

The call tracking account. Numbers are often registered to the agency. Losing them means losing the number printed on your truck, and porting a number is slower and more fragile than anyone expects.

Domain and hosting for any landing pages. Agencies frequently host campaign pages on their own infrastructure. Those pages vanish when the relationship ends, and the campaigns pointing at them break the same day.

Your Business Profile. Not strictly an ads asset, and it goes wrong the same way. If you run Local Services Ads it is not optional either, since Google requires a public, verified Google Business Profile linked to the Local Services account.

Own the accounts, grant the access. Never the other way around.

What is the accumulated work actually worth?

Put a number on it, because "the history has value" is easy to nod at and easy to trade away.

Take the negative keyword list, which is the most transferable asset in a paid account and the one most often left behind.

A list built over two years on a $3,000 monthly budget. Say it suppresses 15% of spend that would otherwise land on research, job seeker and wrong-service searches. That is $450 a month (derived).

Translate it into work. At LocaliQ's 2026 average cost per click of $8.33 for Home and Home Improvement, $450 is 54 clicks (derived), and at the category's 8.05% conversion rate, 4 leads a month (derived). Those LocaliQ figures are medians across a campaign sample, LocaliQ sells advertising management, and the 2026 edition does not publish its sample size. The 2025 edition disclosed 16,446 US campaigns. Placeholders until you use your own.

Annualised, the list is worth $5,400 of redirected spend and roughly 48 leads (derived). That is what walks out of the door in a handover where nobody asked for an export, and it takes about three minutes to request.

Now do the same for the conversion history, which does not export at all. Google's documentation notes that some Smart Bidding strategies rely on a minimum volume of historical conversion data. A rebuilt account starts that accumulation from zero regardless of how good the new manager is. The negative list is recoverable if you ask. The learning is not.

Rerun both lines with your own budget and your own click cost before your next renewal conversation.

What should the outgoing manager actually give me?

Ask for these in writing before the last invoice, because your bargaining position disappears after it.

A list of every conversion action, what fires it, and which is primary. Without this the new manager cannot tell whether your numbers are honest.

The negative keyword lists, at both account and campaign level, exported. This is the accumulated work priced above.

Audience and data segment definitions, including how long each has been collecting and what membership duration is set. Google defaults these to 30 days with a maximum of 540, and a segment rebuilt with the wrong duration behaves differently for months.

The landing pages, as files or as a live location you control, plus which campaign points at which page.

A written summary of what was tried and what happened. Campaigns paused and why. Tests run. Seasonal patterns observed. This is the piece nobody asks for and the piece the next manager needs most, especially where seasonal timing decisions were made and you would otherwise relearn them by losing another year.

Any scripts or automated rules, with the code and an explanation of what each does.

What should a new manager ask me before touching anything?

Their questions tell you more about them than their pitch does.

A good one asks what a customer is worth to you in gross margin and what share of quotes you close. Those two numbers set the ceiling for everything, and a manager who does not ask is optimizing toward leads rather than revenue.

A good one asks to see your landing page before discussing keywords. If they propose a spend without looking at where the traffic lands, they are planning to send your money at a destination they have not evaluated, and ads pointed at a page that cannot carry them lose money quickly.

A good one asks who answers the phone and during what hours.

A good one is willing to tell you not to spend yet. We will not run ads at a page we know will leak, even when saying so delays the start and costs us the engagement. If a new manager is ready to launch next week regardless of what they find, that eagerness is not service.

And a good one asks what happened before. If they are uninterested in the previous account's history, they will repeat its mistakes at your expense.

How do I make the transition without going dark?

Sequence it, and do not cancel anything until the replacement exists.

Confirm ownership of all six assets first, at admin level. Do this before you give notice.

Let the new manager into the existing account and let them read it for a week before changing anything. Pausing everything on day one destroys the performance history that automated bidding depends on, and rebuilding it takes weeks of clean data.

Keep the old campaigns running while the new ones are built. Overlap costs a little and going dark costs more, particularly in a season.

Agree in advance what the first ninety days are measured on. Not clicks. Leads and booked jobs, with a shared definition of what counts as a lead, written down before anyone is defending a number.

Hand over anything you have that shows how customers behave on your site. Session recordings are underused here, and what to look for in the first thirty recordings is often more useful to a new manager than a year of ad reports.

Tell them what kind of lead you actually want. If your margin lives in scheduled estimates rather than quick phone calls, say so, because getting the estimate request instead of just the phone call changes how the campaigns get built.

Where does a clean handover still lose you something?

In three places, and knowing them in advance changes what you negotiate for.

A rebuild resets learning even inside your own account. If the new manager creates fresh campaigns rather than editing yours, the ownership was preserved and the history was not. Ask directly whether they intend to rebuild, and if so, ask them to overlap rather than switch.

Local Services transfers differently. That account is tied to your verified business, its screening and its linked Google Business Profile, not to an agency build, so it survives a change of manager more cleanly than a search account does. Access to it is managed separately from Google Ads, so check it separately.

Call tracking numbers are the sharpest edge. A number registered to an agency, printed on vehicles and business cards, is both an asset and a hostage. Get the account into your name before there is any tension in the relationship, and never let a new number get printed on anything until you own it.

What to do this week

Log into Google Ads with your own email. Check whether you hold admin or standard access. If you cannot log in at all, or you can only view, that is the first thing to fix and it is a conversation to have today.

Do the same for analytics, tag manager, and your call tracking provider. Write down for each whether you are the owner or a guest.

Then ask your current manager, in writing, for the conversion action list and an export of the negative keyword lists. It is a reasonable request from a current client and the response tells you a lot.

Put a copy of your landing pages somewhere you control, even if it is just saved files. They are cheap to keep and expensive to lose.

Questions about what you actually own?

Email me at eric@seod.com with a list of what you believe you own, account by account, and whether you hold admin or standard access on each. I will send back the checklist of what is usually missing plus the exact request to send your current manager. Plain language, no legal template.

I do this for people who are not becoming clients, because being locked out of your own advertising history is an expensive and avoidable problem. Takes me ten minutes.

Or keep reading more on paid search for local businesses.