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 three levels: admin, standard and read-only. 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.

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.

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.

• 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

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.

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.