In the podcast:

02:19 – Why would you want to have your own account?
03:54 – How to own your account?
04:18 – Consequences of not having your own account
04:26 – Analytics Perspective
04:46 – Adwords Perspective
05:37 – How to prevent yourself from the disruption?

I discuss why is it so important to own your own Google Analytics, Google AdWords and Facebook ad accounts? Most business owners don’t realise the consequences and implications of not having control over their digital assets. So, be sure to listen to this episode to protect yourself from this avoidable mistake!

Why is it so important to own your own Google Analytics, AdWords and Facebook ad accounts? I discuss the consequences and implications of not having control over those assets. Be sure to listen to this episode!

So to give you context, you know I run a digital agency called Green Arrow Digital. So I deal with clients all the time and maybe some of you don’t realize I also teach a lot so I’ve got my own PPC Academy where I teach business owners how to do what we do. And I also teach at a university here in Sydney, Australia. So I get access to a lot of business owners which I love and I see something come up a lot which I find it quite disturbing and I guess somewhat unethical in the space and I feel that this is not really spoken about very much in the industry and when I sort of alert people to these issues through my agency or through even university and my own tutorials as well online that people don’t realize kind of the mess that they can get themselves into.

So in this article, I feel is like a little bit of a community service announcement at the same time and I want to talk about the importance of owning your own accounts. And the accounts that I mean are your Google Analytics account, your Google Adwords account and your Facebook account. You’ve got to own your own accounts and it’ll become apparent as to why and also hopefully you can work out if you understand why it’s so important throughout this article. Let’s get stuck in.

Why would you want to have your own account?

Like what’s the difference, you know. Like let’s say you engage an agency and they appear really helpful. Will setup the account for you, don’t worry will take care of it. It sounds all innocent. It sounds really helpful and it’s almost like a great customer service offering.

The thing is a lot of business owners don’t realize is that if somebody else create your own account you don’t actually own that account. It is with their log in agency account. It’s an account that’s created under their banner. And ultimately you don’t have control. And so the implications of this which many people don’t realize is that if and when you choose to leave that agency you lose your accounts. You lose your Google Analytics account, you lose your AdWords account etc. etc..So people don’t realize the consequences of that and I’ll get to that in a minute.

This is why it’s something that you have to pay attention to and investigate a little bit because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this where people don’t own their own accounts and so therefore if they were to leave all of their tried and often cases that they’re not happy with agency and they’re trying to leave they lose all that data. So you need to create your own Google Analytics account, your own AdWords account etc. and then you merely give that agency that very helpful agency access to your account. And it’s a very subtle but very distinct difference.

How to own your account?

So you go to google.com/analytics and you create your account. You go to google.com/adwords and create your account. You don’t even have to set it up but it’s under your log in, your primary log in and then you merely give them access to it. That’s how you do it. That’s the best way. And then you can control who is getting access to your account.

Because as I said before, if you don’t do this, when you want to leave, you’ve lost all that valuable data and by valuable data I mean let’s say from an Analytics perspective, you lose all that history of everyone who’s come to your website and through what traffic sources at which traffic sources are working well and where the leads coming from and which pages are people looking at all that really insightful and valuable information. You will lose that history. And from an Adwords perspective, you won’t know which keywords are your converting keywords, easy money keywords. This is the closely guarded secret by any other business owner or AdWords agency. What are the converting keywords. You’ll lose that information, you lose which campaigns are generating the most leads.

You lose all that really, really valuable information which will help your next agency because your next agency that you go to or if you want to learn how to do it yourself which is entirely possible and bring it in house. You’re going to be effectively starting from scratch from a data perspective and you really don’t want that especially if you’ve been spending a considerable amount of money or even building up your website traffic through various other joint ventures and SEO techniques etc..

There’s such useful information that will help you or the next person hit the ground running when you do eventually take back control away from that agency that you’re not happy with for whatever reason. It will mean it’s much more seamless for you to keep going and hopefully improve results even more so I feel this is a really a topic that people just have no idea about. And every time you know I’m in a teaching setting and we discover that in fact they don’t own their account that it’s sort of this moment of dread and thought and this feeling of how am I going to get myself out of this situation.

So my goal from this article is that you don’t even find yourself in that situation. So how do you know if this is the situation? Well firstly hopefully you may know if you’ve created your own account and if you’re not sure, well then maybe it’s a conversation you need to have with your agency as to exactly you know that question. did you create the account for me? and can I get access to that account as the primary account holder? And then I’m going to give you access if you want to continue with them. So you know you need to be aware of this distinction because an alarming amount of business owners just have no idea about it. So it’s something that I think is really, really important for you.

And so hopefully you can now appreciate the importance of this and can prevent yourself and your business from the disruption. And you know I guess the business revenue disruption that it can potentially cause.