So often, social media managers and trainers focus solely on helping their clients learn the best practices for things like their social media content mix, engagement techniques, optimal posting schedules, and targeting of their ideal clients. Because making sure our clients are doing all the right things with their social media is the most important job, right? We don’t think about making sure our clients know how to do things like safeguard their accounts, and what’s OK and not OK when it comes to granting outside vendors access to their online profiles.

As a firm that offers training on and audits of Facebook ads as well as management of your Facebook ads campaigns, we’ve seen a lot of good… and not so good… situations with our clients’ Facebook ads accounts over the years. Your Facebook ads account is yours and yours alone, so make sure you are following these 3 ads account safeguard best practices.

3 Ways to Safeguard your Facebook Ads Account when Outsourcing your Ads

• Make sure your agency requests access to your Facebook Business Page and Ads account instead of claiming it (if they use Business Manager) Business Manager is a Facebook Page and Ads management tool designed with agencies in mind. It allows an agency to pull in clients’ Facebook Business Pages and Facebook Ads accounts, and assign their own agency employees to manage specific Pages or Ads accounts. Since agencies typically work on several Pages and Ads accounts at once, Business Manager provides a central location of sorts for agencies to work from. The issue that many unsuspecting small business owners run into here is that Business Manager gives a person the option to “request access” to a Page or Ads account, or to “claim” a Page or Ads account. But if an agency was to “claim” your Facebook Business Page or Facebook Ads account, that makes the agency the owner of the Page or Ads account, and not you. That’s why is so critical to make sure you talk to anyone you hire to work on your account about requesting access vs. claiming.
• Make sure the agency uses your Facebook Ads account when running ads for you If the agency doesn’t, all of that ads history and data stay within the agency’s ads account and not yours. You can’t peek in on ads that are in someone else’s account either. And you won’t be privy to any audiences/targeting your agency is using for your ads. There’s a lot to be learned from previous ads to, in turn, mold and improve future ads, so when you stop working with that agency, all of that ads history, data, and saved audiences stay with them and not with you.
• Make sure the agency is using your Facebook Pixel (and not their own) The best way to make sure of this is to download the Facebook Pixel Helper to your browser and click to check it when you are visiting your site on your computer. When you click on the browser extension, you can see how many and what pixels are on any given page of a website, and what the pixel ID number is. If the pixel ID number you are seeing in your Facebook ads account isn’t the same pixel number you are seeing with the browser extension, then that means your pixel isn’t being used on your website. Your pixel and the traffic it gathers is an incredibly powerful marketing tool for you as it gives you the chance to advertise to people who have previously visited your website. If your pixel isn’t on your website, you aren’t building your own website custom audiences, and even worse, your agency may be using your pixel traffic to build theirs.

Outsourcing is a very popular choice for small businesses. Being aware of just a few important points like those listed above can keep your accounts and online profiles secure, in your control, and with you having all the data and analytics always under your ownership.