Google Ads Manager Account Build and Offboarding

The test of a manager account is not how quickly a client goes in. It is whether you can hand one back in a day, with conversion history, change log and billing intact, and still be the agency they recommend. We build for that, which is why our hierarchies look conservative beside the ones we replace. Ownership first: Wherever the client can hold their own account and their own payment profile, they do, and you hold a manager link with admin access. Agencies push back, because the alternative feels like security. It is the opposite. The agencies that lose accounts badly are the ones where leaving means abandoning five years of conversion data, and every client eventually works that out, at which point it poisons the renewal conversation you were trying to protect. Where consolidated invoicing genuinely matters, because you carry the media and bill the client, we set it up deliberately, with the billing transfer and offboarding path written down before the first account moves rather than discovered at the worst possible moment. The build: Hierarchy by market and service line rather than by an org chart that will be reorganised next year. Manager-level shared negative lists and portfolio strategies where they earn their place, and nowhere near the accounts where they would silently override a per-client setting nobody remembers inheriting. Naming and labelling a new hire can read without a decoder ring. Access on domain accounts rather than personal Gmail addresses, roles set to the minimum the job needs, two-factor enforced on every user, and a quarterly access review, because the most common way an agency loses a client account is not performance. It is a departed contractor's login and a compromised account running spam ads across a weekend. Reporting that does not fall over: Past a handful of accounts, Looker Studio pulling live through the Ads connector becomes a dashboard people stop opening. We set up the BigQuery Data Transfer Service for Google Ads on a nightly schedule and build reporting on the resulting tables, so every number is identical for everyone at 9am, joins to client revenue are possible at all, and nobody is watching a loading spinner in a client meeting. If you need the API directly, we take you through the developer token application, what Google expects to see for standard access, and the login-customer-id header that breaks every first integration. Merchant Center and the links that quietly break: Shopping clients need an advanced Merchant Center account and a link structure that survives a transfer. GA4 links, conversion imports and Merchant Center links are the three things that fail silently during migration and get discovered three weeks later when somebody asks why Shopping stopped. We migrate in a fixed order, verify each link from both sides, and never move accounts in the last week of a month, when billing cycles and invoice reconciliation are already contested. The runbooks: Onboarding, offboarding, and the incident path for a compromised account: remove the payment method, audit users, pull change history, then contact support, in that order rather than the panicked reverse. Two pages each, written for whoever has to run them at seven on a Friday evening. What this is not: We do not staff your accounts. This is a build and a handover, and the training exists so that you do not need us afterwards. We do not build white-label reporting that obscures which platform a number came from, because clients find out eventually and it costs more than it ever saved. We do not create client accounts under agency ownership without a written offboarding clause, including when the agency specifically asks for that. And we take no view on your pricing model, but we will not design a structure whose purpose is to make your numbers hard to check.