Getting started with the tools you need to run your business, such as a website, email, and social media can be daunting for some business owners. Maybe you’re not tech savvy, not sure how to do it on your own, or don’t have the time, so you hire a marketing agency to handle it all for you.
It might look like this…
The agency registers your domain name (your website address).
The agency creates your website and has full access to the administrative side. Maybe you do as well, maybe you don’t.
The agency creates your Google Analytics account, maybe your Google Ads if you run campaigns.
It may feel easy on your end…someone else is handling all the technical stuff and you don’t need to worry about it. And that’s perfectly normal.
BUT…
These are business assets, and highly valuable ones at that. Your business should be the owner of all of those accounts, granting user access to your agency, not the other way around.
Why do I need to own my website and marketing accounts?
Your website is an important and valuable business asset
A website is one of the most valuable assets your business owns. It is the home of your business’ content, SEO rankings, user data, branding, lead generation systems, and more.
If a third-party agency owns your website, your hosting account, or website platform (proprietary or otherwise) they completely control access. You will invest a huge amount of time, effort, and money into your website over time. You need to be able to move it, change it, or add users to it without needing someone else’s permission or timeline.
You need control over your domain name
Your domain name is the address at which your website is found (eg. www.domain.com). If someone else registers this address on your behalf, they own it.
This could potentially mean they could:
- Prevent you from transferring it to the registry of your choice
- Withhold it if your relationship with them ends
- Sell it
- Not renew it on time, leaving you without your entire website
Regaining ownership of a domain is extremely difficult work, and in some cases not possible. If a domain name is not renewed, it is open to be registered by anyone else, and it is up to that new owner to sell it to you. Sometimes they’ll demand a high price for your domain.
Your domain name is also tied to your email. If you lose your domain name, you lose access to all email related to that domain name.
For these reasons your domain name should be owned by you and you alone.
You can change providers without having to start from scratch
If your reputation with your third-party agency ends for whatever reason, you may run into issues with their withholding your assets. If you are not able to attain access or ownership of your assets, you may have to move on and start everything over.
This could mean losing valuable data on your potential customers, your entire website, your email, or other assets the agency owned.
When you own your assets, you can simply change who has access to them, and maintain your assets’ security. Former employees’ access can be removed more efficiently, for example, preventing any malicious activity.
You protect the years of SEO rankings you’ve built
SEO takes years of hard work to build up. If you are required to start over with your website or your domain, you lose all of that hard work.
You could potentially lose:
- Difficult keyword rankings
- Domain authority (how valuable search engines believe your content is)
- Backlinks (valuable links from third-party websites back to yours)
- Overall search engine visibility
You’ll have invested a significant amount of time and money into your SEO, so it’s important to protect it by owning your website and domain name.
Privacy issues with shared data
This is something not many business owners consider, but it is incredibly important. Depending where your company is registered, your country likely has data privacy laws.
If your website’s hosting, email, and user data collection accounts are owned by a third-party agency, your business is required to disclose who has access to that information.
In some cases, there is also privacy legislation to adhere to when collecting private data such as health information (eg. a mental health website tracking user activity on symptom pages).
If a third-party agency owns your assets in this case and you do not disclose this to your users, or if they do not adhere to legislated privacy laws, your business could find itself in legal trouble.
You retain access to the leads and customer data you’ve collected for your business
If you’re using your website as it is intended as a lead generating and lead nurturing tool, your business will want to own the user data and lead information it has collected.
In addition to retaining access to this information, your business should also be performing regular tests on its website, including online forms, lead generation automations, and other website functions. If you don’t have access to your website, you’re unable to ensure this valuable asset is operating as intended.
What marketing and business operations assets and accounts should I own?
The list of potential accounts can be extensive, but I will list the most common assets you should consider when assessing what your business has access to.
Website & CMS Platform
A CMS platform (Content Management System) is software that both hosts your website design and allows you to publish new content that fits into a pre-built theme or template. This is a great tool for business owners who don’t want to hire a website designer every time they need to change content on their website.
Popular CMS platforms are WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix. These are platforms that use theme files to create the overall design of your website, and when you enter your content, it fits within that overall theme.
Your business should have at least one staff member set as a full administrative user on your website. Administrative users have full access to everything within the website, including content, theme files, and any functionality built into the site such as forms, plugins, or other.
If a third-party agency built your website, they should create an Administrative user for the owner of the business and someone on your staff (if appropriate). Then they should demote themselves to an editor role* so they no longer have access to add or delete users (which should be entirely in your control)
*You may decide that they remain as Administrator role in addition to yourself if they will be working on your website in a way that requires this level of access, but be sure to have a contract in place stipulating what their access allows and disallows them to do.
Click below for instructions on how to add/remove users on each platform:
Domain Name
As noted above, owning your own domain name is extremely important to maintain security and on-time renewal for your website and email.
Domain names can be purchased from any domain name registry, such as GoDaddy, Namecheap, or Rebel.ca. They are registered for a minimum of one year up to ten years, and need to be renewed before that period ends. I highly recommend setting up auto-renewal on all your business’ domains.
Within a domain’s registry information, you can set four contacts:
- Registrant Contact: The person who owns the domain registry account.
- Administrative Contact: The person in charge of administering the domain, such as approving transfers, updating contact information, receiving renewal reminders, etc.
- Technical Contact: The person you assign to handle technical aspects of your domain, such as DNS records, nameservers, etc. (typically your website designer)
- Billing Contact: The person in charge of the billing for the domain (usually an accounting staff member or third-party bookkeeper).
The registrant contact is the most important contact to assign, as it is the owner of the domain. This should ideally be set to the business owner.
Website Hosting
Your website’s files require a server to live on, and this is called website hosting. Many business owners default to using GoDaddy for this as it’s cheap. (It is not the best option for several reasons, though, which is a topic for another day.)
NOTE: If you have a Squarespace or Wix site, hosting is part of your website account so this doesn’t apply. If you have an HTML or WordPress website, however, you’ll need your own hosting account.
Your website’s hosting server is another account your business should own rather than an agency. It houses all of your website’s files it needs to operate. If you don’t own the account that houses those files, you are risking potential catastrophic loss through failed renewal of services and mismanaged control of the account.
I highly recommend you own your own hosting account. Your website designer can easily be granted user access to load and manage your website files, but you should have full control over the account.
I have worked with several hosts over the years and have two recommendations for hosts with the best reliability and user friendliness:
- Siteground
- You’ll typically only need the StartUp package
- Highly reliable and easy dashboard tools
- Approximately same price as GoDaddy but far more reliable and no hidden up-charges
- My recommendation for most standard websites
- WPEngine
- Strictly for WordPress or PHP-built websites
- More pricey but powerfully efficient and tremendous customer service
- Recommended for larger websites, major e-commerce, or websites that have a significant amount of additional functionality that needs better processing power
Google Analytics
If you don’t already know what Google Analytics is, it is a platform tied to your website that collects and displays data about your website’s users.
Some information it collects includes:
- How many people visit your website
- What pages they view
- How they arrived at your website
- What third-party websites link back to yours
- What actions they take on your website
- Some demographic data
Google Analytics (GA) is attached to your website via a small bit of code embedded in the header of each page. It collects a vast amount of valuable data that belongs to your business, and for this reason your company should own the account.
Most good website designers will include a GA account as part of the process of building your website. If they created a new one for you, you will need access to that data.
In my experience, I have come across many businesses who don’t even know a GA account exists for their website, let alone have access to it. You should not only own the GA account, but control who is set as users on that account.
The only people who should need access to your GA account other than you are marketers working on promoting your business. They can use the data to make informed decisions on marketing efforts, as well as report on results from campaigns.
You should be the primary owner of your GA account, and any relevant marketers needing access should be set as any other role outside of Administrator.
Click here for information on how to add users to your GA account.
Google Search Console
I work with many, many businesses who not only have never heard of Google Search Console, but also don’t have an account or don’t know one already exists.
Google Search Console (GSC) is the tool directly related to your website’s Search Engine Optimization activity. It is the platform you use to tell search engines how to treat your website’s content, where to find it, learn what keywords are directing traffic to your site, and view organic search traffic patterns.
If you don’t already have a GSC account, go create one now. Then follow these steps:
- Choose property type: Select domain so that your account captures all subdomains or other protocols tied to your website
- Verify ownership: This is best done using DNS records (other reason you should own your domain name and hosting account). If you don’t currently have access to these, ask your current website designer to manage this step.
- Submit your sitemap: Once your ownership has been verified, go to Sitemaps and paste in the URL to your website’s sitemap. This can vary depending on which website platform you’re using.
- Squarespace sitemap: yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
- WordPress sitemap: depends on if you are using an SEO plugin
- WordPress core (no SEO plugin): yourwebsite.com/wp-sitemap.xml
- Yoast SEO or RankMath Plugin: yourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml
- All-in-One SEO Plugin: yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
- Wix sitemap: yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
- You’re done!
If you aren’t sure if you have an account or not, be sure to reach out to the agency managing your website as they may have created one that can be transferred to you.
Email Marketing Platforms & Contact Lists
Your contact lists are your business’ lifeblood. Leads and customers you’ve earned should be owned and controlled by you and not a third-party agency. You may have earned these contacts through your website’s online forms, or through an email marketing platform. This means your email marketing platform is another account your business should own, rather than your marketing agency.
Popular email marketing platforms are Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Constant Contact, or complete CMS platforms such as ActiveCampaign, Salesforce, and HubSpot.
No matter which platform you choose, your business should own the account and assign users with appropriate roles to any other individuals who require access.
Since contacts can come from any number of different platforms and online forms, it’s a good idea to perform an audit to determine a list of these sources. Once you have a list, ensure you own the accounts. If not, request they be transferred to you by whomever does own them, and assign users accordingly.
Google Ads
If you run paid ads through Google, you should own your ad account. There are several benefits to this:
- You control your spending and have direct access to receipts
- You can make changes immediately when needed to ads, keywords, budgets, and conversion tracking
- You know the money you’re paying for ads is being fully implemented to your campaigns
- You can pull reports on campaign results as needed
Google Ads contain your brand’s reputation, and having control over the ads and campaigns being run, as well as the ability to track results properly, is important.
Many businesses hire an agency to run their Google Ads campaigns, but that doesn’t mean the agency needs to own the ad account. Ideally, you should own your own account and grant user access to your agency.
Click here to learn how to add users to your Google Ads account.
Social Media Profiles
Your business’ reputation is something that should be entirely in your control. The posts you publish on your social media profiles, as well as the proper management of comments, is something you should own and have procedures and guidelines outlined for.
But granting user access to social media can be tricky. Not all platforms allow this as easily as they should.
TikTok, for example, only allows business accounts to add users. That being said, if your TikTok represents your business, it should be set as a business account.
Access to Meta, including Facebook and Instagram, can (and should) be managed through Meta Business Suite, but Threads is not yet included in these controls.
Request primary ownership of any and all social media accounts your marketing agency might have control of. Then, grant user access as needed for these profiles.
NOTE: This includes any ad accounts you have tied to these social media profiles as well.
Here are some links to instructions on adding users to specific social media platforms:
- TikTok
- Meta Business Suite (including Facebook & Instagram)
- Log into your account at https://business.facebook.com
- Go to Settings
- Choose People for individuals, or Partner for an agency
- Follow instructions to add new users
- Add users/partners to access on each platform and ad account as needed
- LinkedIn company page
- X (Twitter)
- YouTube
- Threads: You cannot add users to Threads at this time. If your agency is writing your posts on your behalf, it is best for them to send them to you so you can post them yourself. This ensures the security of your account, rather than providing them your only login credentials.
While it is common and completely normal to hire a third-party marketing agency to handle your online presence, there is a right and a wrong way to handle it. For the security of your business and the management of your reputation and future growth, it is best to own your own accounts and simply grant access to the agency to fulfill their hired work.
Need further help?
I am happy to help you with advice on regaining control of your accounts, or to answer any questions you have about this topic. Feel free to book a call with me at your convenience.
