This is the least interesting article in the library and the one most likely to save you money. Marketing builds assets — a domain, a website, a business listing, an advertising account with years of history, a list of everyone who ever enquired. If those sit in someone else’s name, you are renting your own reputation, and you find out the day you want to leave.
The five things to check
Your domain name. The registration should be in your business name, with your email as the contact, at a registrar you can log into. This is the single most important one: whoever controls the domain controls your email and your website address.
Your website. Both the hosting account and the files. On a proprietary platform you may not be able to take the site with you — worth knowing before it is built, not after.
Your Google Business Profile. Yours, with your account as the primary owner and the agency added as a manager. Google explains owner and manager roles in its Business Profile Help.
Your advertising accounts. Google Ads and Meta both allow an agency to manage an account that you own. The account history — what worked, what did not, years of conversion data — is valuable and does not transfer.
Your customer and enquiry data. Every name, number and conversation. Exportable, in a normal format, on request.
Why it matters more than it sounds
Advertising accounts accumulate learning. A Google Ads account that has been running for two years knows more about which clicks turn into enquiries than a new one does. Start again and you pay to relearn it.
A Google Business Profile carries your reviews. Losing access to it means losing the ability to respond to reviews, correct your opening hours or stop someone else editing your details.
A domain carries your email. If the domain lapses or is transferred away, your email stops, and a competitor or a squatter can register it.
None of this is usually malice. Most often it is a shortcut: an agency sets everything up under its own account because it is faster, and nobody revisits it. The cost lands on you anyway.
Example: the handover that was not one
An illustrative scenario. A roofing company works with an agency for three years and decides to change. The agency is professional about it and sends over the login for the website.
Then the details emerge. The domain is registered to the agency, because they bought it during setup. The Google Ads account is a sub-account of the agency’s manager account and cannot be moved with its history intact. The Google Business Profile has the agency as primary owner, and the person who set it up left the company. Four hundred enquiries sit in a CRM on the agency’s plan, and the export is a spreadsheet with the conversations stripped out.
Everything is eventually resolved, apart from the ad account history. It takes eleven weeks, during which the campaign is off and the phone is quieter. Nobody behaved badly. It was set up wrong at the start, and the person who paid for it was the one who paid for it.
The data part is also a legal duty
Enquiries from your customers are personal data, and in the United Kingdom the business collecting them is generally the data controller — that is you, not your agency. An agency handling those enquiries on your behalf is a processor, acting on your written instructions.
That is not paperwork for its own sake. It means you are the one your customer can ask for a copy of their data, and the one who answers if it is lost. The Information Commissioner’s Office sets out what controllers and processors must have in place at ico.org.uk.
Practically: there should be a written agreement covering what the provider may do with the data, and you should be able to get a full export whenever you ask, not only at the end.
Fixing it without a fight
If you are mid-contract and some of this is wrong, it is usually straightforward to put right. It is only awkward if you wait until you are leaving.
Ask for ownership transfer as an ordinary piece of housekeeping, not an accusation. Most providers will do it the same week. Transfer the domain into your own registrar account. Ask to be made primary owner of the Business Profile and add the agency as manager. Ask for your ad accounts to be linked to their manager account rather than owned by it. Ask for a full data export and check you can open it.
If a provider resists all of this, you have learned something useful for free. A reluctance to hand over a domain is not a technical problem.
Your ownership check
Work through this once a year, and again before signing with anyone new. It takes an afternoon at most.
- Can you log into the domain registrar yourself, and is the business the registrant?
- Can you log into the website host, and could you move the site elsewhere?
- Are you the primary owner of the Google Business Profile?
- Do you own the Google Ads and Meta ad accounts, with the agency added as manager?
- Do you have access to analytics and Google Search Console in your own account?
- Can you export every enquiry, with the conversation, in a format you can open?
- Is there a written agreement covering what the provider may do with customer data?
- Does the contract say what happens to all of the above if you leave?
Keep the answers in one document with the logins stored properly. The point is not distrust. The point is that these are your assets, and an asset you cannot reach is not really yours.