Who owns your Google Ads account? (Check in 60 seconds.)

Here's a question that ends a lot of agency relationships, usually a year too late:

If you fired your agency this afternoon, what would stop working by Monday?

Most owners guess "the ads." The real answer is often: the ads, the website, the Google Business Profile that produces half your calls, the phone number on your trucks, and two years of data about which campaigns actually worked.

“It's our name on the trucks and their name on the login.”

That's the second move of the Black Box. The first is reporting what it wants you to see. The second is renting you your own assets — building everything under the vendor's login, so that leaving costs more than staying.

It isn't always malicious. Plenty of agencies do it because it's faster to set up. But the effect is the same: you're paying to build something you don't hold.

The good news is that every one of these is checkable in about a minute, from your phone, without asking anyone. Do the four below now.

Check 1: Google Ads — 20 seconds

1. Go to ads.google.com and sign in with your Google account — not one the agency made for you.
2. If you can't sign in at all, stop. That's your answer.
3. If you can: top right, the account ID (XXX-XXX-XXXX). Then Admin (gear icon) → Access and security.

What you're looking for:

The test that matters: can you remove the agency's access yourself, right now? If the answer is no, you don't own the account. "We'll transfer it when you leave" is a promise, not a setting.

Check 2: Google Business Profile — 15 seconds

Your Business Profile — the map listing, reviews, hours, the "Call" button — is, for most local businesses, the single biggest source of calls. And it's the asset most often held hostage.

1. business.google.com → your location → Business Profile settings → Managers.
2. There are two roles that matter: Primary owner and Manager.

There can only be one primary owner. It should be you.

Check 3: Local Services Ads — 10 seconds

If you run LSA (the "Google Guaranteed" ads with the green check), the account lives under a manager account, and whoever holds that manager account holds your LSA history, your reviews on LSA, and your ranking.

1. ads.google.com/localservices → sign in.
2. If it redirects you to an account that isn't yours, or you can't sign in, the agency's MCC holds it.

Moving LSA between manager accounts is possible but slow, and your history — reviews, response-time record, the things LSA ranks on — may not follow you. Lawyers in particular: this is where "the agency has our LSA" becomes "we're invisible for six weeks."

Check 4: The website — 15 seconds

Three pieces. You need all three.

The third row is where the rented website lives. A lot of agency contracts say, in effect: the site is our platform; you license it while you pay us. Stop paying and the site goes dark — or you're offered the chance to "buy it out." If your contract says "proprietary," "licensed," or "platform" anywhere near the word "website," read that paragraph twice.

Next post in this series is about the rented website specifically. For today: if you can't log in to the registrar and the host, you don't own the site.

Bonus check: the phone number

If your tracking number — the one on the trucks, the yard signs, the GBP listing — was provisioned by the agency in their call-tracking account, it's theirs. Cancel, and the number that's been on your trucks for three years rings to nothing.

Ask: "Which account is our tracking number in, and can you port it to us?" If they hesitate, that's the answer.

Your scorecard

Seven boxes. Most owners who do this for the first time check two or three. That isn't a reason to panic — none of this is irreversible — but it is a reason to fix it before you need to leave, not after. Ownership is cheap to ask for while you're a paying customer and expensive to negotiate once you've given notice.

How to ask

You don't need a confrontation. One email:

"Before we plan next quarter, I'd like to get our accounts into our own names: Ads admin under my login, GBP primary owner, LSA under our own manager account, domain and hosting logins, and the tracking number ported to us. You keep full access to manage everything. Can we do that this month?"

A good agency says yes and does it in a week. A Black Box explains why that's complicated.

Why AdPlanck sets it up this way from day one

Every account we touch is in the client's name before we spend a dollar. Ads, GBP, LSA, domain, hosting, tracking numbers. We get manager access; you hold the keys. It's on the pricing page in writing, because the alternative is a business model we named this series after.

→ Download the ownership checklist (the seven checks, printable, no email required)