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Working with agency
Posted by on November 15, 2025 at 10:45 pmIs it normal for agencies to not give clients access to Facebook accounts?
Currently working at a company and it’s my first time managing an agency, but they are extremely secretive about what results are.
It’s not my choice working with this agency, but often times I get the sense they are inflating numbers to take a bigger cut in their payments. There is actually no way for us to validate how many leads they’ve generated for us on the backend. We basically have to rely on their crappy platform they built that often breaks.
For example one of the campaigns they run is a Meta website traffic campaign. But on our backend we can’t actually validate if they send clicks to the site. If they run a conversion campaign, we can’t see how many leads they’ve generated. As an example on their platform it will say they generated 100 leads, then if I check for the same date for leads it will then say 140 leads, and a day after that it will say 70 leads.. and their excuse is that their platform is going through updates, which doesn’t make sense because their platform is just to connect to their Facebook ads account.
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1 Reply
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This is normalish for an agency to have their own dashboard and use platform source of truth and share with you results like that. What’s not normal and not OK is for you to not have your own method of validation if those results. Be it GA, or some sort of MTA solution you don’t want them grading their own homework.
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Not normal for you to not have access to the ad account. This is one way to hold you hostage so you don’t leave because starting over from scratch would be so painful.
You should have the leads going into your own CRM or platform, to make sure you have one source of truth for all lead generating campaigns. This is what we do with all our leads gen efforts across clients. Meta will often inflate conversions because of CAPI and modeled conversion data.
Even with platform updates, the number of leads should not make a massive change like that. This agency is taking advantage of your company and whoever signed the agency contract. If they won’t show you the ad account and what they are doing. Fire them ASAP and get a more transparent agency.
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You don’t have access to your own Facebook ad account? No. That’s not normal. That sounds like a shady agency practice.
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Nope, that’s very old school and most agencies have moved away from that model. It lacks transparency and control, cornerstones of a company’s marketing.
Unfortunately, trying to move away from them may be difficult (on purpose) because you’ll have to rebuild everything from scratch.
You should be able to get some more realistic numbers from Google Analytics assuming they are sending traffic to your website and not stand alone landing pages.
Of course if they are sending your “leads” you can substantiate those because presumably you are communicating with those people in some way, shape, or form?
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Your bricklayers or plumbers don’t have the keys to your house, even though they built it for you.
Same here.
Meta has the option for partners access to connect an agency with YOUR company account.
But you should always own it and be able to take anyone you’ve let in…out.
It’s your business asset, not theirs, and it’s non-negotiable.
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Not normal at all. You should be able to see the data.
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Not giving you ad-account access is a giant red flag. If numbers keep changing but you can’t verify anything on your end, that usually means the tracking or reporting layer is being manipulated. Are you running traffic or conversion campaigns as the main objective?
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No, this is a big red flag.
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Not normal, moreover for me it’s a red flag.
I was just Auditing a campaign for a Restaurant chain and her me out.
The agency is running a Meta traffic campaign for them, and guess what… Facebook is delivering TRAFFIC, but very little conversions. Because the whole algorithm is geared towards only traffic.
For example in their case, one campaigns for location delivered 3,200 website visits (from about $1K) so this looks nice so far, but there were ONLY 8 clicks on the ‘Book a Table’ and 4-5 other conversions like contact us or click the phone number.
That’s a terrible conversion rate to be honest.So, I’m most certain if they are running your Meta campaigns with ‘traffic’ goals you’ll barely get any conversion out of those campaigns.
Also, I have created a video about most common agency red flags, I hope you find it useful:
[https://youtu.be/qklp-PJa1io](https://youtu.be/qklp-PJa1io)
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