What to Do When You Inherit a Google Ads Account After an Agency Exit

The agency is gone, the account is yours, and you're looking at 40 campaigns you didn't build, naming conventions that read like an internal joke you weren't around for, and a boss who expects performance to continue uninterrupted. Welcome to one of the most common situations in the "agency exodus" of the last couple of years.

Maybe your company fired the agency (if you're still up in the air about that decision, I wrote about that separately). Maybe the agency fired you (it happens, usually when the relationship isn't in the agency's best interest). Maybe the contract just lapsed and someone said "you can handle this, right?" in a tone that wasn't really a question...

However you got here, the workload isn't the hard part. The hard part is the uncertainty. You don't know which settings are intentional and which are oversight. You don't know what's actually influencing the leads, what's driving quality, and what's wasting time and money driving T4 leads. Claude says to pause the "US | S | DKI-TEST | T9000 | tCPA360 | EXACT" campaign, but it has 23 conversions at the same cost per conversion as another campaign Claude said was your best campaign and you don't understand the difference.

I spent years on the other side of this handoff, as a Paid Search Director and VP inside agencies, so I've seen what accounts look like when they leave an agency's hands, including the parts the offboarding email (if you're lucky enough to get one) doesn't mention. Since then I've coached a lot of in-house marketers through this exact transition. Every scenario is different, but there are some constants I can share with you to spare you some of the frustration that can come with inheriting a Google Ads account from someone else.

What should you do first when you inherit a Google Ads account?

Before you evaluate anything, make sure the account is actually, structurally YOURS. This step gets skipped constantly and it can cause some nasty problems if the agency is one of the slimy ones (the good ones are out there, trust me).

Some background on how agencies operate: most run client accounts through a manager account (Google calls it a "My Client Center", or an MCC), an umbrella account that links to dozens of client accounts underneath it. That's normal, and honestly much better than any of the alternative options. What's not fine is when the agency holds your account hostage. Confirm your company's Google Ads account has an email as an admin directly on the account, not just as a user the agency invited.

This is important: DO NOT add only one team member's email address as an admin on the account, because if that team member leaves the company, you're suddenly locked out of your account. Go with a generic email address accessible by multiple team members (e.g. "ppc@dopesaas.com" vs "sarah@dopesaas.com").

This is even more important: Take the same precautions with the billing profile of the account. You want to make sure the billing profile is accessible regardless of who is with your company, so an email address accessible by multiple people in account is better than the personal email address of your finance director (e.g. "ap@dopesaas.com" vs "timmy@dopesaas.com").

If the agency has the only access to the account and they won't release it, you're not inheriting an account, you're starting a new one. That means that everything Google learned about your customer, what they search when they want a demo, what signals buying intent, and how much to bid for a profitable close rate... All that stays with the old account when you are forced to start a new one.

Once you've confirmed all of that, revoke the agency's access (and any mystery email addresses you don't recognize, of which there will be several), check who owns the Google Tag Manager container and the analytics property, and export the change history before anything else happens. The change history is the account's built-in log of every change anyone made and when they made it. It's the only record of what the agency actually did, and it's the closest thing you'll get to their institutional memory (you can export the last 2 years of change history).

Should you make changes to the account right away?

Sometimes. If you know for a fact that there are completely irrelevant keywords, things your company doesn't want to advertise for, or you've been spending a fortune and getting absolutely nothing of value in return, cut out the waste before it gets worse. In this case, you're looking to pause things, not to add, move, or remove.

When it comes to adding or moving things here's the counterintuitive part: once the account is secured, the best move for the first couple of weeks is usually to touch almost nothing.

I know. You're looking at a structure you don't understand, and every instinct says to start adding new keywords, testing new campaigns, adjusting bids, etc.

But if the account runs on any automated bidding strategy (Google's automated bid strategies: Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value), performance is built on accumulated data patterns, and dramatic changes reset parts of that learning. If the account is performing anywhere close to decent, moving things around on day one can break things even more and kill what performance was there. Even if cost per lead is hundreds of dollars above your target, making immediate changes can double that gap, or worse.

Instead, spend those weeks (at least one, seriously) watching and documenting. Where does the money actually go, campaign by campaign? What converts? What has a high or low CTR? What happens after visitors from Campaign A hit the landing page vs Campaign B? What does the weekly rhythm look like? You're building the baseline you'll measure your future changes against, and you only get to observe the untouched version once.

So you're not adding, adjusting, or moving things, but pausing can be helpful. Right. How do you know what to pause?

How do you audit an inherited Google Ads account?

Agency-built accounts have characteristic leaks, and I say that with love for my former clients and team members. When one account manager runs 35 accounts, some things get set once and never revisited.

Here's where to look, in order:

Conversion actions. Open the conversions summary and ask, for every single action listed: what IS this, is it still firing correctly, and does it represent money? Inherited accounts routinely optimize toward conversions defined years ago by someone gone even longer. I've audited B2B accounts where the agency couldn't drive leads, so they were optimizing for people who spent 2 or more minutes on the website. They were considering it a success when someone opened the page and walked away, or if someone read an article, and Google's automated bidding was optimizing to find more of that.

Check whether actions are set as primary or secondary, if they're counting 'Every' conversion, or just the first 'One', how long a call has to last before it is considered a conversion, whether anything's double-counting, and whether the values assigned bear any relationship to reality.

Network settings. Search Partners is a network of non-Google sites that show your search ads, and Display expansion pushes your search budget onto banner placements across the web. Both get enabled by default and both routinely underperform actual Google search (bad traffic, clicker bots, spam leads, etc). Check every campaign. One account I saw had Search Partners running for years because the person who would have turned it off was three account managers ago. The setting took thirty seconds to fix and had been bleeding over $10,000 every month. The bigger the account, the more likely these settings have been missed (especially if the account has changed hands several times over the years).

Search terms. These are what real people actually typed before clicking your ads, as opposed to the keywords you bid on, and one of the main ways Google makes its money off lazy or unaware advertisers. Pull 90 days, sort by cost, and actually read every search term that has driven over $100 in cost. One account that came to me was running five figures a month through a single broad match campaign, and the search terms report showed 60% of spend going to searches with no real connection to the business. Check the change history for negative keyword additions. If the agency wasn't adding them regularly, or if they were only adding them as exact match negatives (in square brackets), you're going to find a lot of waste.

The recommendations tab and auto-apply. Check whether the agency left auto-apply recommendations enabled, because Google will happily "optimize" your account in its own favor while nobody's supervising. Turn auto-apply off, and treat the optimization score and the recommendations tab as what they are: Google's profit maximizers, not a to-do list.

Scripts, rules, and experiments. Agencies leave automation behind like previous office tenants leave random paperwork. Find every script and automated rule and figure out what it does before it does something you didn't expect on a Saturday.

Why does the account have so many campaigns?

There are a couple of reasons. Some of it is because multiple ad managers had their hands in the account and nobody knew what was going on, so they tacked their stuff onto it rather than pausing or removing the old stuff. Sometimes the account is bloated because ad managers respond to new initiatives by adding a campaign, rather than building it into an existing campaign. Some of the campaign sprawl is legacy best practice from an era when granular segmentation genuinely helped. Under modern machine learning it actively hurts, because fragmenting your conversion data across dozens of campaigns starves every one of them of the spend and data density the algorithms need to really perform well.

So look at every campaign and ask: why does this exist separately? If the honest answer is "different product line with different economics," fine. If it's "someone segmented by match type in 2021," that's a campaign you can roll up into an existing top-performer. And ask the bigger question underneath the structure: what is this account built to DO, and does that match what the business actually needs from it? Move slowly (remember the learning-period warning above), but move.

When you move things around, though, be sure to leave something with performance where it is. If several things in a campaign need to move to other campaigns, leave the parts that are performing the best and reorganize/build around that.

Can AI help you figure out an inherited account?

Yes, but only if you do it right.

Don't pull the trigger on any recommended changes yet, because the first thing most people in your position do now is paste screenshots into ChatGPT and start having it walk them through the changes.

That can have catastrophic repercussions if you don't know what you're doing.

Where AI genuinely helps:

Translating the account into plain English. Export your campaign names, settings, budgets, and spend, hand it to Claude or ChatGPT, and ask it to explain the structure and flag anything worth investigating. It's genuinely good at "what is this and what questions should I ask about it," which is exactly the position you're in.

Grunt work on the search terms report. Theming thousands of search terms into negative keyword candidates is hours of human tedium and minutes of AI work. You still approve the list, but the sorting can really help you do the initial cleanup. After the first batch of AI-categorized negatives, you should really be looking at the search terms yourself on a regular basis and practice reviews manually.

Writing the update for your boss. Summarizing the change history, drafting the 90-day plan memo, turning platform jargon into an email a CFO can read... All of it done as a solid draft you can polish up with minimal edits (never send anything without a human QA pass).

Where AI will cost you a fortune:

Advice that looks right. This is the most common problem and the most expensive one, because bad AI advice doesn't look bad. It spits out recommendations that are structured, confident, and generally reasonable.

Without account context it's often flat wrong. With context and good prompting it's often still wrong in a more subtle way: it reasons from general best practices, and general best practices don't adapt to your account's specific situation (the seasonal dip that explains the "underperforming" campaign, the structure that shouldn't work, but does, etc). You're three weeks into this account. You can't tell confident from correct yet, and that's exactly where plausible-sounding advice leads to mistakes.

Execution you didn't ask for. Recently I had AI consolidate campaigns in an account I manage. I was meticulous about what should be done and how, and I guided it with my own knowledge of the account at every step. Somewhere in the middle it missed a label and started adding negative keywords as TARGET keywords.

After a brief heart attack, I reversed every change and did the work manually.

Here's why that's messed up. I do this for a living, and I run AI with a full context library, rules systems, permission gates, and beefy principles files I built based on my own training and coaching... and it still happened.

If it can bite an expert with guardrails in the butt, it can absolutely bite someone alone in an unfamiliar account at 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon.

The platform's own "AI." I have never talked to a person, expert or otherwise, who has used Google's Ad assistant and come away with anything good.

It pulls from generic internet articles, rather than Google's own platform knowledge, and is so shoddy, kids in their mom's basement who have never managed ads are building better tools.

The practical rule: use AI to understand the account faster, and treat every recommendation it makes as a hypothesis to verify, never a change to execute. It gets dramatically more useful the more it understands your account, your business, and you. Even so, it's never a replacement for expertise, only an augmentation.

What should you tell your boss about the transition?

The truth. Early. Because it covers your butt.

If the tracking was set up to optimize for low-quality or low-intent actions, fixing it will almost certainly make reported conversions DROP for a while before it gets better. Sometimes reported conversions drop while actual business results hold steady or improve, but sometimes it gets worse before it gets better and you want to explain that BEFORE the dashboard dips, not after.

Give it to them straight: "The agency's account had problems X and Y. I've secured it, plugged the leaks, and I'm rebuilding on solid measurement. Here's the 90-day plan."

Managers can handle a real plan with a real timeline. What burns in-house marketers is inheriting an account, saying nothing, and getting pegged for unexpected shifts in the numbers that had to happen to get the account back on track.

When does it make sense to get expert help?

Inheriting an account is one of the best reasons to get coaching from a professional. Sure, you can learn Google Ads from tutorials or a course, but what tutorials and pre-recorded courses can't give you is someone who has audited hundreds of agency handoffs looking at YOUR account and telling you which of the 40 campaigns matter, which settings are landmines, and what order to fix things in.

That pattern recognition compresses weeks of cautious guessing into an hour or two.

One or two sessions at $350 each typically covers the full audit, the triage order, and the restructuring plan. Then you run it yourself, with a plan you understand well enough to defend in the Monday meeting, which was the whole point of bringing it in-house.

If you're ready to book a session, you can do that here: calendly.com/kinglyconsulting/coaching-call

If you have questions first, book a free 30-minute call: calendly.com/kinglyconsulting/30min