Stop Hiding Your Ad Account from Clients

Stop keeping clients from seeing your work.

The most critical element of a client and agency relationship is trust. That’s why it drives me crazy when I hear these stories of advertisers protecting their results.

So, there are really two ways to manage a client’s ads and do so without violating any of Meta’s rules. You can have the client share their ad account and assets with you, which is probably cleanest and preferred. Or you can create a separate ad account for all of your clients that you own. You’ll also, of course, need the client to share necessary assets in that case, too.

Something I’ve seen far too often is advertisers will create an ad account for the client, but they won’t give them access to it. So the client gives them access to the Facebook page, Instagram account, and maybe the pixel, custom conversions, and custom audiences. Or the agency may even start all of the pixel, event data, audiences from scratch.

And that’s where things get weird.

The agency creates a wall so that the client can’t see behind it. Of course the agency will send monthly updates with results and tell them what they’re doing, but that’s it. And when they do that, the client needs to just take the agency’s word for it.

When you ask the agency why they do things this way, it’s often one of a few things, if not a combination.

First, they might say it’s just easier this way. By starting over with the ad account and pixel and events and audiences, there’s less to try to get the client to share. While I don’t completely agree that this is a smart move, I get that argument.

But the most annoying claim is that what they’re doing in the ad account is proprietary. They are doing things that are unique to their agency. No one else is doing it. They’re afraid that if clients saw what they were doing, they’d fire the agency and do it themselves.

And that’s where it falls into weird paranoia land.

I don’t know what y’all are doing that you think your strategy is proprietary, but it shouldn’t be all that complicated these days. It actually makes me think you’re doing something super complex that isn’t even necessary based on how things work now.

Or maybe your approach is actually pretty simple now, which is how it should be. Minimal campaigns and ad sets, minimal settings flipped. And because of that, you’re scared that a client will see this and wonder what you’re actually doing.

But that’s not giving yourself credit.

An advertiser’s job is far more than complex campaign construction and customizing settings. It’s understanding how to approach campaign construction and why. It’s knowing what campaign objectives and performance goals to use and why. It’s knowing how ad targeting and audience suggestions work now. It’s knowing how to use breakdowns to troubleshoot problems related to demographic distribution, placements, and more.

It’s about knowing why you should define your audience segments, how to do it, and what to do with that information. It’s knowing that you shouldn’t take conversion results at face value, so you break down by attribution setting or use the compare attribution settings feature. It’s knowing that there are rules and special ad categories and violating rules can get your account shut down. It’s a basic understanding of tracking, of conversions API, the pixel, deduplication, and making sure all of that data is sent accurately.

And even then, even after you understand all of these things, you know that everything is in a constant state of change. Meta will launch a new feature, add new rules, or completely change how campaigns are created. It’s your responsibility AS THE EXPERT to be on top of these things.

Do you really think that doing your job is as simple as copying your campaigns? Because if you believe that how your campaigns are set up is proprietary and is the way to replace you, there’s a problem.

Maybe you’re not that good at your job after all.

You do not need to hide these things from your client. I understand that making it viewable can lead to more questions from clients who don’t understand what they’re seeing. But that’s where your job as an expert comes in, and you can build that trust by educating them.

Probably the worst reason to keep the ad account from a client is that you don’t want them to see the results. And that’s where you get into downright shady territory.

So here’s the bottom of the glass.

A good agency and client relationship starts with trust. Give your client access to everything. You don’t need to hide it.

You still need to know how to present results and simplify things so it makes sense to them. If you think they can replace you by copying your current campaigns, your problem is that you need to address where you add value.

If possible, manage the client’s ad account and use their pixel, events, and audiences. That way, when your relationship inevitably ends, because they all will eventually, they will have that history and those assets to pass to the next agency.

And both the client and agency will thank you for it.