The short answer
You should. Who owns the Google Ads account comes down to two things: whose people hold Admin access, and whose payments profile pays the bill. If both are yours, the agency works inside your account and you can end that any day. If both are the agency's, you're renting your own ad history.
Plenty of owners never check either one until the day they try to leave. Here's what Google's own help pages say, what we found across 464 home services websites, and what to check this week.
Who owns the Google Ads account under Google's rules
Google answers this more plainly than most agency contracts do. An agency usually runs your account from its own manager account, and that manager account can be marked the owner of yours. Google says a client account can have only one owner, and that admins on the owner's manager account can invite or remove users, grant or revoke admin access, and transfer ownership.
Google also says the client account still owns its data and can remove the agency's ownership by unlinking. The catch is who can unlink. Google's access-level table gives that power to Admin users only. If every admin login on your account belongs to the agency, your right to leave exists on paper and nobody on your side can use it.
Three ways the setup traps you
- No admin of your own. Only an Admin can grant more than email-only access, change access levels, accept or reject manager links, or unlink a manager. Without one, every change goes through the agency, including the change that ends it.
- The agency pays the bill. If the account is on monthly invoicing and the agency's manager account is the paying manager, Google says the account stops serving once you unlink it. Move billing to your own payments profile first, or your ads go dark the day you leave.
- Your audiences live in their account. Remarketing lists shared from the agency's manager account don't come with you. Google says ad groups that target those lists, and campaigns that exclude them, stop running after the unlink.
What you keep when the account is yours
If the account is yours, unlinking costs you very little. Google says an account that unlinks keeps its own campaign history and access to every Google Ads feature. That history (search terms, bids, conversions, years of it) is the most useful thing in the account, and it's exactly what a new account starts without.
What the LVL3 Home Services Growth Index shows
This isn't an edge case. In the LVL3 Home Services Growth Index, 261 of the 464 home services websites we crawled on October 20, 2026 carried a Google Ads tag. That's 56%. Most of these operators are buying clicks.
And 70 of those 261 had no call tracking we could detect, a bit more than one in four. Among the lowest-traffic third of operators (by estimated organic search traffic), 28 of the 58 running ads had none, about half. In the trades the phone is where the money shows up. An account you can't administer, plus calls nobody tracks, means you can't answer the basic question: what did the ad budget book?
Ask for this setup, in writing
- The account sits under your business, with someone at your company as an Admin, on a company email rather than anyone's personal login.
- The agency gets access through a manager account link or a Standard user login. It can run every campaign without being the only admin.
- The payments profile is yours, so unlinking never switches the ads off.
- Conversion actions, call tracking included, live in your account. If they run on a tag in the agency's manager account, Google says it keeps recording conversions only from clicks before the unlink, and only for the conversion window.
- Shared audiences get rebuilt in your account before any exit, not after it.
How to check yours today
Open Google Ads and go to Admin, then Access and security. On the Users tab, see whether anyone from your company is an Admin. On the Managers tab, see which manager account is linked, then ask the agency in writing whether it's set as owner. Then open Billing settings and see whose payments profile and payer details are on file. Three screens and one email, and you'll know where you stand.
When we asked ChatGPT what a home services roll-up should require from a marketing vendor on data and account ownership (LVL3 citation run, October 22, 2026), its answer came down to one line: the company owns the assets, the vendor operates them. That's the right rule for a single location too.
How we run it
In our engagements, ad accounts sit under the client's name, along with analytics, search consoles and hosting. It's the same rule as the rest of the work. A regional home services operator we work with owns its rebuilt website outright, and its paid budgets now move on booked revenue per market. If an engagement ends, the account, its history and the data stay where they started.
Sources
- Google Ads Help, "About ownership of client accounts" (support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7456532), accessed October 22, 2026.
- Google Ads Help, "About access levels in your Google Ads account" (support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9978556), accessed October 22, 2026.
- Google Ads Help, "About unlinking accounts from your manager account" (support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7458428), accessed October 22, 2026.
- The LVL3 Home Services Growth Index 2026: 464 operator websites crawled October 20, 2026. Tags and call tracking are what the crawl could detect on each site.
- LVL3 AI citation run, day zero: 26 questions, ChatGPT web, logged out, search on, October 22, 2026 (question 26).