How do I switch Google Ads agencies without losing performance?

Google Ads allows multiple manager accounts linked at the same time, so there is no technical reason for a gap between agencies. The new team links in, reviews the account while it is still running, and plans the transition with full visibility before anything changes.

A hard cutover, where you remove the old agency on Friday and the new one starts Monday, means decisions get made blind and urgent fixes wait on access requests. The overlap costs nothing and removes the riskiest week of the whole switch.

Almost never the switch itself. The damage comes from three specific moves. Wiping or rebuilding campaigns, which throws away the conversion history Smart Bidding runs on and resets the account to a cold start. Changing the feed setup so product IDs change format, which makes Google treat your whole catalog as brand new and drops the performance history on every product. And stacking big changes in week one, where every major edit resets the learning phase again.

A good incoming agency transitions what works and earns the rebuild case with data. One that wants to nuke everything on day one because the old setup is beneath them is about to spend your money re-learning what the account already knew.

The access checklist is the easy half. The valuable half is context: which products carry the account, what was already tested and failed, how the feed is built and through which app, what the tracking stack looks like, and any Merchant Center history like past warnings or reviews.

You can judge the new agency by what it asks for. One that requests the search terms history, the feed setup, and the tracking configuration before touching anything is planning to keep your momentum. One that only asks for the budget number is planning to start over, whether it says so or not.