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Am I screwed? Taking over GA account from Agency (MCC). Running out of options..
Company decided to bring SEM in-house (only GA for now), from a very large agency. They felt they weren’t prioritized and didn’t think the agency spent more than a couple of hours a month on the account. (The usual story with small time clients to big time agencies)
The GA account was originally set up by the agency, and I’m not entirely sure but I do believe they granted admin access to one of our previous employees. They did however set up the billing with their own information and tied it to their MCC. So they were managing the payment as well.
When it was time to transfer the account to us, they had forgotten about the whole billing situation all together. Apparently they weren’t used to transferring accounts back to clients directly. They were usually just transfering the accounts to other agencies.
So when they granted us admin access, it was still connected to their MCC, with their payment account, payment profile and payment users.
Our plan at first was to keep monthly invoicing as payment method. I’ve only worked in-house on existing accounts, so I didn’t know how this works.
They figured we need to set up a new payment profile. First we tried to do it in the GA account itself to no avail (no option), then we tried pay.google.com but the only option I have there is to set up card payment for my personal account.
Agency tried to add us as payment/billing users (not sure why), but they got an error.
Next, they had us start a manager account and contacted Google support in order to change the current payment profile to a new one that would be tied to our new manager account. As mentioned earlier we could not create one. We were also told that monthly invoicing wouldn’t be possible, we’d have to apply for it and with a brand new account there’s no way we’d meet the requirements.
Google support then tells us that we can set up a payment profile by creating a new GA account through our new manager account, however the manager account cannot be linked with an automatic payment profile. ”Therefore you are not able to see any billing set up.” So that’s a no-go.
The support then asks the agency (current payment manager) for authorization to create a new payment profile for our GA account with automatic payment.
They get it, and they verify themselves.This is G support’s response:
”Post checking the details, I see that the Google Ads account: X is a large customer sales (LCS) account.
As per the Google policy, LCS accounts are not allowed for card payments. In case you switch the account to card payment it can cause the account to be suspended. Read more [here](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6145574?hl=en).
So please confirm once so we can make the changes.”
In other words, we will likely get suspended by changing to automatic payment, which is really our only option on this account. And they’re still asking us if we want to do it.
Not sure what our options are at this point?
We really wanted to keep the account as is, and keep the ads serving without interruption. It’s an old account with lots of valuable data.
But perhaps it’s best to export the campaigns with GA Editor and import them to a new account?
I guess we would be able to set up billing then without being suspended (I hope).What do you guys think we should do?
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1 Reply
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Can you not reach an agreement with the agency to keep paying the invoices while you transfer the money to them? I know this is annoying but the whole setup was wrong to start with. The account should have been under your company’s name from day 1.
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I went through this EXACT situation with my current position, but it was less hectic. To be honest, billing should have been thought about months prior to the transition and completely transferred the day you retired the agency in order for this to go smoothly.
I have also worked in house so Google billing reps helped us throughout the entire process. If your account spends enough, you should be able to get invoicing set up with no issue after providing financial documents. Did they not do that for you? Or does the account not spend enough?
If a card isn’t possible you might have to pause ad spend till you get this figured out with billing which could take 1-2 months because of Google’s billing partners schedules being very far out (bc India lol). Don’t wanna be one of those guys but genuinely PM if you need help. I just retired my company’s large agency and moved in house.
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If setting up a new payment profile is not working and you can not get monthly invoice, which makes sense since it is a new ad account.I would just launch the new ad account.
If you do get suspended on the old ad account and Google won’t unsuspected you. Trying to set up a new ad account would be against their TOS and just get that ad account banned too. A new ad account seems like the best path forward.
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Usually for non lcs accounts you have to have a minimum spend in an mcc to setup an invoicing profile. But if the account is lcs no restrictions apply. Setup your own mcc and apply for invoicing in your own company’s name it should go through. First support response about requirements was wrong.
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Ask support for your LCS rep
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