You fired your marketing agency. Here is what to do in the first week

Secure ownership of your accounts first, before you spend a minute thinking about who replaces the agency. That means the Google Ads account, Google Analytics, Tag Manager and your domain all sitting under logins your business controls, with the agency's access revoked cleanly rather than the accounts abandoned or rebuilt from scratch.

Firing an agency is usually a slow decision that arrives with some guilt attached, and most of the agency relationships I inherit ended through drift rather than bad faith. Whatever the story, the week after the split follows the same playbook, and you can run all of it yourself.

Which accounts does your business need to own?

Four at minimum: the Google Ads account, the Google Analytics 4 property, the Google Tag Manager container, and your domain registrar. Add Meta Business assets and any email platform if they were in the agency's hands too.

Google Ads access comes in five levels, from email-only and billing up through read-only and standard to admin. The healthy structure is that the client owns the account at admin level and any manager, agency or freelancer works through linked access that the client can revoke. If your agency created the account inside their own manager account and you have never had admin, fixing that is the single most important task of the week, and it is worth asking politely and promptly while goodwill remains.

What do I secure in the first 48 hours?

Work through the platforms one at a time and write down who holds the top level of access on each. Start with Google Ads, where Google's own list of access levels actually runs to five, since email-only and billing sit below the three that matter for campaign work, and only an admin can grant access to other people, change someone else's access level or link a manager account. Then Google Analytics 4, or GA4, where you want administrator rights on the property rather than viewer rights on a shared report, and then the Google Tag Manager container, which carries two layers of permission: account level, where a user is either a plain user or an administrator, and container level, running from no access through read, edit and approve up to publish. Publish rights on the container installed on your site is the one that matters, because a container you cannot publish to is a container you cannot fix.

Search Console behaves differently from the rest. A verified owner proved ownership with a token, an HTML file, a meta tag or a DNS record, and a delegated owner was granted the status by one, so removing a delegated owner happens in the interface while removing a verified owner also means deleting their token from your site, since a token left in place lets them verify themselves back in.

That leaves Meta Business Suite and the ad account inside it, the domain and its DNS records at the registrar, the website's content management system, and whatever sends your email. Confirm your own admin logins work before you revoke the agency's users, in that order and never the reverse, since an account with no working admin is a support ticket rather than a marketing channel.

How do you take control without losing history?

Keep the existing account alive. Its conversion history, keyword data and audience lists have real value, and a fresh account starts learning from nothing. Ask the agency to grant your business email admin access, confirm you can log in and manage users, and only then remove their access. Resist any suggestion to "start clean with a new account" unless the old one is genuinely unrecoverable.

Move fast on the tag side too, because some losses are permanent. Remarketing audiences decay daily while your site is untagged, and the people who visited during a gap are unrecoverable. If tags lived in the agency's Tag Manager container rather than yours, getting a container you own onto the site is urgent rather than administrative.

How do I keep the ads running while I decide?

The instinct is to pause everything the day the termination email goes out, and it is usually the wrong call, because pausing costs you the recent data automated bidding depends on, the enquiries you would have taken while you hire, and the remarketing audiences described above, which never refill for the stretch you were dark, as I set out in what remarketing is, and why untagged days never come back.

Do the two things that reduce real risk instead. Check the billing, because if the payment method belonged to the agency the account stops for non-payment at the worst moment, and put your own card on it the day admin arrives. Then reduce the surface: switch off anything experimental, keep the campaigns with a history of producing enquiries, and let a quiet account tick over while you interview.

What should you export before anything changes?

While access is stable, download what a future you will want: campaign structure through Google Ads Editor, the search terms reports, the change history, billing documents, and any reporting the agency sent. Ask for a written note of what conversion actions exist and what each one fires on. None of this takes long, and all of it is harder to reconstruct after logins shuffle.

One export has a clock running on it. Google Analytics 4 keeps user-level and event-level data for either two months or fourteen months on a standard property, with longer windows reserved for Analytics 360, and the setting sits in the property's admin section where nobody thinks to look. Check yours the day you get access, move it to the longer option if it is on the short one, and pull the reports you will want next year.

What am I entitled to under the contract?

Read the agreement before the final invoice, and read three things closely: the termination clause and its notice period, any cancellation or early-exit fee, and whatever it says about ownership of accounts, data and creative work. I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice, so treat it as the shape of the conversation rather than a ruling.

The usual pattern is that your accounts and your data are yours, since they describe your business and were paid for out of your budget, while the agency's templates, internal tools and licensed software stay theirs. Creative work sits between the two and is settled by whatever the contract says, so if you want the layered design files and raw video rather than exported images, ask while there is goodwill in the room, and where the contract is silent, settle it in a short confirming email now.

• 1List every account your marketing runs on and who currently holds admin
• 2Request admin transfer on Google Ads, GA4, Tag Manager and the domain
• 3Export campaign structure, search terms, change history and billing records
• 4Confirm your own admin logins work, then revoke the agency's access
• 5Run the self-checks on the account before speaking to any replacement

• The Google Ads account · check this today

  Owned by the business, with the agency added as a user who can be removed.

• Google Analytics and Tag Manager · check this today

  The measurement history is the part you cannot rebuild later.

• The domain and the DNS · usually fine

  Held at a registrar you can log into without asking anyone.

• Google Business Profile · usually fine

  Reviews and the map listing follow the profile, not the agency.

• The website files and the CMS · usually fine

  Including whatever the site is actually hosted on.

Export everything before the relationship ends rather than after. Access is easy to grant while people are still being polite.

What should you check before hiring anyone new?

Run the self-checks in is my ads agency doing a good job on your own account, because they diagnose an inherited account just as well as a live agency. Confirm your Search campaigns have not leaked into the Display Network, which I cover in why your budget is going to random apps and websites. Check conversion counting: for lead generation it should be set to one-per-click, so one person filling in your form twice counts once.

Verify before you condemn, though. In my 2026 takeovers, 30 of 70 suspected tracking problems proved false once I actually checked inside the Tag Manager containers. The setup you inherited may be better than the relationship was, and the three receipts gives you the evidence standard to test it against.

Why might performance dip even if you do everything right?

Smart bidding optimises toward whatever the conversion action counts, and it re-learns slowly when that data changes. If the old tracking was polluted, and I have seen an account where a tag firing on page load counted 75% of clicks as conversions, then fixing the counting means the bidding system must relearn from honest data. Expect a dip measured in weeks rather than days, and treat it as the cost of standing on solid ground. Anyone who promises instant improvement on top of corrected tracking is guessing.

How do I judge the next person differently?

The relationship you just ended taught you something specific, so use that as the filter. If the reporting was the problem, make measurement the first thing you ask about, and how to brief a Google Ads freelancer carries the brief structure and the single question that sorts candidates faster than a portfolio does. If access was the problem, settle ownership before the first invoice: the business holds admin, and the person you hire works through linked access you can revoke. Then run the self-checks from month one rather than in year two, because that is the discipline that would have surfaced the last problem a year sooner.

When should you bring in help again?

Only after the week above, because you will brief better and buy better once you own everything and know what actually works. Before you sign anyone, read what Google Ads management costs in South Africa and freelancer versus agency versus fractional so the quotes have context. Two of my standing rules apply here: below roughly R7,500 a month in media budget, pay no management fee at all, and whoever you hire should fix measurement before judging the campaigns they inherited. If a candidate opens with a rebuild pitch before showing you evidence, keep interviewing. If you would rather hand the account to someone once it is properly yours again, that work sits on my paid media page, and if you are an agency covering the person who left rather than a business replacing an agency, the freelance and white-label page is the one to read.