You may remember a couple of years ago when we were limited to having access to 25 ad accounts per user profile.
Now we have several profiles that have up to 100 ad accounts each. That’s a few hundred accounts in total.
If you’re a consultant or ad agency, should you just create new campaigns in your primary account or go through the hassle of creating a new account for each client?
Here are reasons why you should make the extra effort to have the client set up a new ads account and then invite you as a “general user”:
• The client then understands what they’re paying to Facebook for ad spend versus to you for a fee. Facebook recommends a 20% management fee. So if your client spends $5,000 a month, then your fee would be $1,000. If you bill the client $6,000 (spend plus fees), it’s not the same as paying an SEO consultant $6,000 in fees. You want to create transparency.
• Clients trust you more. Let them know up front that at any time, should they elect, they can take their accounts in-house. We see a lot of agencies who play dirty tactics when a client realizes their performance isn’t up to par. They will claim they can’t provide access to the account because there are many accounts there. And you wouldn’t want us giving someone else access to your account, right?
• Clients appreciate the value you add. If you’re a killer at Facebook ads, then you WANT them to log in to see what you’ve done. If your ad campaigns are so simple that anyone can easily replicate what you’re doing, then you’ll want to re-think your long-term viability. With Google AdWords, my favorite tactic in auditing existing accounts is to look at the change history, to see the list of most recent optimizations they have done. You’ll likely find little to no tweaking going on.
• The spend is not your responsibility. Sometimes a client is insolvent or slows to pay. We had a major retailer delay paying us for 90 days because of a switchover to a new accounting system. So we had to absorb $85,000 a month for 3 months. You don’t want to tie up cash like that.
• You can train up folks on the client side. Why not have your cake and eat it, too? Still, charge your fee and train up their staff to do most of the work. Then you can spend your time doing high-leverage stuff for the client. A smart client evaluates you based on the impact you provide, not the number of hours you bill.
That said, if the client is spending less than $1,500 a month, or whatever your threshold for making it worth your time to manage their account, you might just put them in your main ads account.
Maybe they have a one-off campaign for an event, so there’s no ongoing need for promotion and optimization.
Or they just really want to cut one check to you. Perhaps their finance folks don’t like to ad spend on credit cards or the client just doesn’t want to fill out additional paperwork.
In that case, use a credit card that gives you miles, so at least you’re earning something on that spend. Just make sure that you’re not left holding the bag by floating their ad spend.
