Ad Agency Access: The Devil is in the Facebook Details

• Contest Factory
• August 30, 2018

Ad Agency Access – Keep Your Assets Safe

One of the major things that makes the life of a marketer so hard these days is that the position is constantly evolving around you. Just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, Facebook or another social network or marketing software platform comes along and sends you right back to square one.

Setting up all these social networking accounts, advertising accounts, website tracking and email marketing solutions takes a well-schooled marketer or Ad Agency — there’s no doubt about it. But you must also make sure you’re setting everything up the right way to protect your valuable data moving forward. With the right permissions, ownership settings, access controls, and data breach prevention techniques, you’ll be able to have the total control you need over who owns and who has access to your critical and sensitive information.  And don’t rely on your ad agency as you need to be the one holding the keys to the car.

Because Facebook is the most advanced in enabling proper data security measures and agency access (no wonder after recent proceedings), we will be focusing on Facebook alone, which also sets certain access levels for Instagram based upon the ownership and commonalities in media.

The Proactive Approach to Controlling Access

As you take the necessary steps to create your digital marketing funnels, you’ll often deal with a wide range of separate tools like Facebook, Twitter, Google (and its many tools like Keyword Planner and Ads Manager), YouTube, and more. All these platforms have their own account setup procedures and best practices to follow, many of which can vary wildly depending upon exactly what it is you’re talking about.

As we said, our first foray into digital operations, data security and agency access, will focus on the behemoth leader in social media marketing, Facebook.

Facebook allows many different methods for account access depending on your goals. If you wanted to gain access to one of the pages that belonged to your own client, for example, you could:

• Choose to grant access to your personal profile directly to that page.
• Access that page as an individual based on your status as the client’s Business Manager or a related employee.
• Be added as an administrator to the Business Manager and have access to all their assets.
• Create your own Business Manager and add yourself to their page (or even to their Business Manager) as a partner.

You could do all of the above, but would you know what you have done?

For the sake of example, let’s say that you’re trying to get access to your client’s ad account on Facebook. You should always run ads for your clients from an account that they own, not yours. Not only can each account only have one pixel (tracking methodology & tactic), but you also need to think about protecting your own reputation.

At this point, it’s probably safe to say that your client is ready for use of the Business Manager and a proper business ad account. To set things up under this type of structure, you would need to:

• Create a new Facebook ad account for your client that is owned by THEIR Business Manager.
• Transfer any existing personal ad account INTO their Business Manager.
• Assign your agency as a partner by requesting access into their Business Manager.
• Once you are a partner, you must add your personal profile as an admin to the page and ad accounts.
• If the pixel has not been shared to your agency, you will need this done as well. It can be shared or requested access.

Doing this will preserve any pixel that they’ve already set up on an asset like their website, thus preserving data and custom audiences created along the way.

Depending on exactly what it is you’re trying to accomplish, there are three main options in Business Manager that you can then use to access that account you just created:

1. Choose “Add an Account,” which will transfer ownership of the existing personal ad account into Business Manager.
2. Choose “Request Access to an Ad Account,” which will allow you to add on as a partner to that ad account.
3. Choose “Create a New Add Account,” which will create a new ad account that the Business Manager account will then own.

If you want to have your client add you as an admin on the existing Business Manager account, the steps are equally straightforward. From the “Business Settings” page in Business Manager, simply:

1. Click “People” under the users menu.
2. Click the “Add” button.
3. Click “Admin Access.”
4. Enter your own email address into the text box.
5. Click the button labeled “Next,” then the button labeled “Invite.”

You will get an invitation to the email address you provided which, once you accept it, will allow you to become an administrator and run things from that perspective as well.

This is just scratching the surface on Business Manager and how to administrate access to your account which in turn has data privacy concerns. We will continue to delve into Ad Account Operations and look at Facebook Analytics, Audiences, Across Devices Measurement, Google Admin, and more.