Fired a marketing agency 4 months in, took me a whole extra month just to get access to my own ad accounts back
Signed with a shop out of Austin back in March because I was drowning running my own Google Ads for my gutter business. They promised weekly reports and full account access from day one. Well guess what, day one never came. I didn't think much of it at first because leads were trickling in. But by month four I noticed my cost per lead tripled and I had zero clue why. I asked for login access to the ad account and got hit with 'our internal process keeps clients out of the dashboard to prevent errors.' That sounded off to me. I fired them and then spent 31 days chasing them to hand over my own account. Turns out they had rebuilt my campaigns under a manager account tied to their email, and the only thing I got back was a read only view. I had to file a dispute with Google just to regain control of my own billing. If you've ever gotten locked out of an account an agency built for you, how did you get it back?