Can a third-party advertising agency lock me out of Adwords?

[DanDeceuster]

Hey all, I've just started at a new company. We spend quite a bit on Adwords and I'm tasked with seeing how that is going and assessing that spend. The problem is, Adwords and Youtube ads have been given to a third-party advertising agency. They are only willing to share the number of clicks, cost and conversions, stuff like that. They refuse to give us access to the account.

Is this legal? I mostly want to get in there to look at keyword history, see what we have bid on, how often it was searched, stuff like that. But they won't let us in and I'm wondering if they are required to let us look at our account as I would think they are. Please help!

[EGOL]

This company might believe that the work that they do is proprietary.  They don't want you to sniff it because they worry that you will discover valuable information that will enable you to leave them and benefit from their work.

If you sell products or services that are common and leave them, there is a good chance that they will take what they learned from you and offer similar service to another business, or set up their own business - if they are not doing it already.  This depends upon them being prevented to doing that by confidentiality language in your contract.  Otherwise it might be considered as their proprietary data.

If I was in your situation, I would examine my contract with this company and see if there is anything in there that prevents me  from visiting the account to verify that they are spending what they say they are spending and that I am the beneficiary of the entire spend.

I am not an attorney but I am pretty sure that there is nothing criminal about their arrangement with you.  But, you have no way of knowing what's happening deep down without full access to the account and all of its historical record.   You probably don't have any civil claim against them unless you can prove that they are violating a contract that both of you have signed.  This is certainly where an attorney would be helpful, if the service provider is located where enforcement is possible.  Otherwise, you will probably have to wait until your contract is up for renewal or negotiate a termination.

Based upon my own use of Adwords, I believe that things work best when bidding strategies are informed by pricing, costs of good sold, profit margins, and lifetime customer values..... and pricing strategies at the item level can't be wisely set if you only have aggregated data.  That would be my argument to get access to the account.  Bidding and selling are best done with shared data rather than things being held secret... but some people have a poor understanding of that or simply want to work behind a curtain without knowing if they are delivering best possible performance.  That's personal opinion.

[seanmccauley]

Interesting question you pose.

Do you have permission from your boss to look at adwords account? If so then I would think that you should have access.. Agencies wont want you accessing account and making changes however as you mention its very useful to be able to see which keywords are gaining best ctr so that you can repeat in your SEO efforts. Forgive me for being cynical however their refusal to allow you access could hide a number of issues eg the change history will reveal how much work they are doing (or not). Even worse they could be spending your firms budget direct ads to other sites. If they wont allow you access you need to get some very good reasons indeed. Otherwise time for a new agency imho.

[badgergravling]

If the agency is working on your behalf, then it depends on the agreed contract. Ultimately, you might decide that it's worth switching to an agency which isn't as protective about the accounts.
Personally as someone who runs Adwords and Youtube accounts for various clients, I tend to group them within the account for my agency simply because it means we have a bigger overall spend, so we might get a slightly better response from Google etc, and it also means that we never have access issues when we're checking them daily (and the client generally doesn't have the time or desire to monitor as closely). But I also give them top level account access as a matter of course, even if they never use it - optimising ad accounts isn't a massive secret - it's mainly long, dull and tedious optimisation!

And if a client prefers, I'm always fine with letting them maintain the account as long as I can get the access I need - the only difference really is that it doesn't then count towards the totals for Google Partner status etc, but that's not a massive issue...

Having had agencies hand over accounts in the past, I've seen good and bad examples, and I certainly wouldn't want to work with an agency that wasn't willing to let me have a quick look at negative keyword lists etc every so often, espencially if you're spending a reasonable amount...

[TimHolmes]

I suppose it all depends on who set up the account in the first place, if they did all the ground work and set up the campaigns, and ad groups then they probably don't have to let you see it. I would rather have my account set up in house initially then grant access to third parties who then get tagged as an editor etc, that way you remain as the account holder.

I do not think it unreasonable that you have asked for evidence of what they are bidding on, negatived keywords, search terms, ad trials, optimisation etc. It is all basic data that can be shared. Like Egol said, look into your contract and see what they should be divulging via their reports etc.

Finally....
Are they proving their worth? If not consider outsourcing to someone/ some agency that can or is willing to share, build a relationship and improve.