Who should own the Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts when I hire an agency?

Every account stays in your name, under your email, with your billing details. For Google Ads, the agency sends a manager link request from its MCC and you accept it inside your own account. You stay the owner. No passwords change hands at any point: Shopify uses a collaborator code, Google Ads uses the MCC link, Merchant Center uses an admin invite or a CSS switch.

Leaving should be one click: remove the manager link and every campaign, every conversion, and all the history stays with you. That is the whole test. If leaving would cost you your account history, the setup is wrong.

When the agency owns the account, your years of conversion data live in someone else's property. Leave, and you start from zero: new account, no history, Smart Bidding learning from nothing, and the high early CPCs that come with a fresh account. That switching cost is not an accident. It is the retention strategy.

Some agencies pitch it as convenience or as access to special account structures. There is no structure worth losing your own data over. An agency confident in its work does not need to hold your account hostage to keep you.

Merchant Center ownership works the same way: your account, your email, agency added as a user. But how the agency requests access matters. On a Merchant Center that has been live for a while, a direct admin access request can actually trigger a suspension review, so the safer route is a CSS switch request instead.

This is a detail worth testing an agency on. One that knows the difference and tells you which path fits your setup has done this before. One that fires off an admin request at a live account is gambling with your feed. Either way, the ownership answer never changes: yours, always.