How to Switch Marketing Agencies Without Losing Three Months

Secure the assets before you give notice

This is the whole article, really. Everything else is detail.

The moment you give notice, cooperation becomes goodwill rather than obligation. Most agencies behave well. Some become slow, and a few become obstructive, and you will not know which yours is until you find out.

So before the conversation, confirm in writing that you have owner level access, in your own accounts, to:

• Google Ads and Meta Business Manager, as the account owner rather than a user on their business manager
• Google Analytics and Search Console
• The domain registrar and DNS
• Hosting and the CMS admin
• The email platform and the list export
• Design source files, not just exported PNGs
• Any tracking or tag manager container

If any of these sit inside the agency's own business manager or their personal account, you do not own them, and rebuilding an ad account from scratch means losing its conversion history and learning. That history is worth real money and cannot be exported.

The terms that prevent this are the ones to insist on next time: scope, IP, and access.

Then check the contract, calmly

Notice period, minimum term, and what happens to work in progress. A 30 to 90 day notice is normal. If you signed a twelve month lock in with no break clause, you may be paying either way, and it is usually cheaper to run the notice period cooperatively than to fight it.

Do not announce the decision until you have both the access list and the notice terms in front of you.

Ask for the handover in writing

A reasonable exit request, sent politely:

1. A list of every account, tool, and subscription, with who pays for each
2. Admin transfer of all of them, on a named date
3. Source files, delivered
4. The current campaign structure and any documentation
5. A list of in flight work and its state
6. Anything scheduled to publish after the last day

Number six catches people constantly. A post scheduled for three weeks after your agency leaves, with nobody watching, is how brands end up publishing something odd on a bank holiday.

Do not let the new agency start by deleting everything

The most common failure in the first month of a new relationship is enthusiasm. A new team arrives, dislikes the previous setup, and rebuilds the ad account, the site, or the tracking in week one.

Sometimes that is right. Usually it destroys the only comparable baseline you had, and by month three nobody can tell whether things improved because nothing can be compared to anything.

Insist on this sequence: record the baseline, change one system at a time, keep the old tracking running in parallel for a month. If the new agency resists recording a baseline before they change things, that is informative.

Set the first 90 days properly

Month one is access, audit, and a written plan you agreed to. Month two is the first changes and the first real report. Month three is the earliest point at which you can fairly judge anything, and even that is early for work that runs on SEO timelines.

Agree in advance what will be reported and what a reasonable result looks like at each of those points. Doing this at the start is the difference between a review and an argument. The structure is in your agency's first week.

Why the last one did not work

Worth being honest with yourself before repeating it. In our experience the common causes, in order:

No counted deliverables, so nobody could tell whether the work happened. No single approver on your side, so everything took three weeks. The wrong brief, where an agency was hired to run ads for an offer that did not convert. And a mismatch of seniority, where the person who sold it was not the person who did it.

Only the first and last are the agency's fault. Changing supplier without fixing the middle two just resets the clock.

Frequently asked

Should we tell the old agency where we are going? No need. Keep the exit administrative and unemotional; you may want a reference or a favour later.

Can we run both for a month? Ideal if the budget allows, and it makes the handover almost risk free.

What does Fixora do in week one? Access, audit, baseline, and a written plan before anything changes. Tell us what is not working and get a fixed scope quote within 48 hours.