Why do some Adwords agencies insist on setting up Adwords in their own account?

[farlandlee]

I'm an online marketing consultant and I work with a variety of agencies who handle Adwords.  I keep running into an issue where agencies want to set up Adwords in a proprietary account for my clients rather than in the client's account and manage it through MCC.  I have just run into again and this time the agency claims they are protecting their Adwords "secret sauce" but that the client will still have full access to keywords, negative keywords, Ad copy, etc.  It just doesn't pass the sniff test with me.

Can anyone tell me if there are some legitimate reasons for an agency to do this other than to simply try to hold data hostage so that clients can't leave them without loss?  I am inclined to tell my client they should run away screaming, but thought I would bounce it off you smart people first.

Thanks!

[farlandlee]

Really good point Paul.  I hadn't thought about the build up of quality score, that is a biggy.  Thanks for your contribution!

[ThompsonPaul]

Fully agree with Brett Here. The other aspect that a lot of clients don't realise until too late is that an account builds up Quality Score value as it ages. If that account is held by the agency and the client decides they no longer wish to do business with that agency, they can hopefully at least obtain a download of the campaigns, keywords etc, but by switching to a new account, they'll lose ALL the quality score that has been built up. They'll be starting again from scratch.

In addition, they'll have lost a great deal of the historical data that would be essential to optimising the new account from scratch.

The MCC system was built by Google to help advertisers avoid getting screwed in exactly this way. Agencies that don't use MCC for clients are clearly saying they're more interested in their own convenience and profit than in what's best for their client.

My $0.02.

Paul

[farlandlee]

This is exactly how I feel.  It is absurd.  Thanks for your response.

[farlandlee]

good point about the antsy clients, but most of my clients have no interest in even touching it. Thanks!

[BrettDixon]

As far as i'm concerned there is no legitimate reason. I've taken on clients that have previously had this scenario and it's absurd. The client, i.e. the ADVERTISER owns the data in that account so agencies should access a clients adwords account via an MCC, that's what an MCC is for!

In EVERY case where i've seen agencies use their own accounts, the client has received flaky reporting and had no real understanding of ROI. If an agency knows what it is doing, it should have no problem doing it properly.

[SoleGraphics]

The only real reason I would avoid setting it up in a clients account is to protect myself from antsy clients that like to tweak stuff without knowing what they're doing.

When we set accounts up for clients we use their acounts and manage everything from our MCC, but there might be something we're missing in the sense of reasons to not use an MCC.