Leaving Your Marketing Agency Without Losing Your Domain, Profile or Phone Numbers

Most owners who call me about leaving an agency aren’t worried about the agency. They’re worried about what the agency has. The domain is in somebody else’s account, the phone number on the trucks belongs to a tracking service they’ve never logged into, and nobody’s sure who owns the Google listing with 200 reviews on it.

I’ve helped a lot of businesses through this over 25 years, and it’s almost always fixable. It goes much better when you do it in the right order and before anyone’s upset. Here’s how.

The Four Things Agencies Most Often Hold

Your website’s content can usually be rebuilt, and the agency’s design and code are often theirs to keep anyway. These four are different. Each one carries years of history that’s hard or impossible to replace.

1. Your domain (yourbusiness.com) and its DNS, the settings that point it at your website and your email. Whoever controls the DNS controls whether your email keeps working.
2. Your Google Business Profile, the listing that shows on the map with your reviews, photos and hours. Reviews don’t move to a new profile.
3. Your call-tracking numbers, the numbers on your site, your ads and sometimes your trucks, which forward to your real line. If they’re switched off, the calls stop.
4. Your Google Ads account, with its conversion history and the data it learned from. A brand-new account starts from zero.

Before you send any notice, find out where each of these stands today. It takes about an hour.

Start With Your Contract

Pull out whatever you signed and read it with a pen. You’re looking for a few things, and I’ll describe them in general terms; for anything that matters a lot, a lawyer can read your actual contract in less time than it takes to argue about it.

• The term and renewal. Is it month to month, or a fixed term like 12 months? Does it renew automatically, and if so, by how long? A few states have renewal-notice laws that can cover business contracts, so note the dates.
• How to give notice. Many contracts require written notice a set number of days before the end of a term, sometimes sent a specific way. Follow it exactly, even if it seems fussy.
• Fees for leaving early. Look for early termination fees, “remaining balance” clauses, or a requirement to pay for the rest of the term.
• Who owns what. Look for words like “work product,” “deliverables,” “intellectual property” and “license.” It’s common for an agency to keep the design and code of a site built on its own system while you keep your domain and content. Know which you have before you plan the move.
• Hand-over terms. Some contracts say how long the agency will keep your site running after you cancel, or what they’ll hand over. If yours says nothing, you’ll be asking for it in your notice.

If something’s unclear, don’t guess. Ask the agency in writing what happens to each of the four things when you leave. Their answer is useful either way.

Check Who Owns Your Domain

Your domain is registered at a registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, Squarespace Domains and so on), inside somebody’s account. What matters is whose account it’s in and whose name is listed as the registrant.

1. Look it up. Go to lookup.icann.org and search your domain. You’ll see the registrar and the expiry date. The owner’s name is often hidden for privacy, which is normal.
2. Find your own login. Search your email for messages from that registrar: renewal notices, receipts, “your domain will expire.” If you find them and can log in, you probably own it already. Check that your name or your business is listed as the registrant contact.
3. If you can’t find a login, it’s likely in the agency’s account. That’s common and fixable. You’ll ask them to move it to an account you own.

There are two ways to move it. If you open an account at the same registrar, the agency can usually push the domain into it, which is quick and keeps everything in place. Or you can transfer it to a different registrar using an authorization code the agency gives you, which takes up to about a week. A registrar can refuse a transfer within 60 days of a domain being registered or last transferred, and some registrars lock a domain for a while after the owner details change, so ask yours before anyone edits them.

Before anything moves, take a screenshot of every DNS record. Those records keep your email, your website and things like your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 working. If the DNS lives at the agency and not at the registrar, it needs to be copied over exactly before the switch.

Check Who Owns Your Google Business Profile

Sign in at business.google.com with your own Google account and open your profile’s settings, then the people and access section. Google has three roles (Google Business Profile Help):

• Primary owner: one per profile. Has full control and is the only role that can hand the profile to someone else.
• Owner: full control, including adding and removing people.
• Manager: can edit the profile but can’t add or remove people or delete the profile.

You want to be the primary owner. An agency should be a manager. If the agency is the primary owner, ask them to add you as an owner and then transfer primary ownership to you. One catch to plan for: someone newly added has to wait 7 days before primary ownership can be transferred to them, or before they can remove other users. That’s why this step starts early.

If you can’t get in at all, or the agency won’t respond, Google has a process for requesting access: search for your business at business.google.com/add, choose it, and select Request Access. The current owner has 3 days to respond, and if they don’t, you may be able to claim it yourself (Google Business Profile Help). That last part isn’t always offered, so asking nicely first is still the faster road.

Check Who Owns Your Call-Tracking Numbers

Find a call-tracking number on your site or your ads and ask the agency which service it’s on and whose account that is. The common services are CallRail, Twilio and a handful of others, and many agencies hold every client’s numbers in their own account.

You have two ways to keep a number:

• Move it to your own account at the same service. Twilio can move numbers between separate accounts through its support team, with both account IDs and written approval from the account that’s giving them up (Twilio). The number’s settings don’t come along, so its forwarding and any texting registration have to be set up again.
• Port it to another provider. The new provider starts the port, and the current account’s administrator authorizes it. CallRail, for example, doesn’t charge to port US or Canadian numbers away, and says a port typically takes 4 to 6 weeks (CallRail).

Here’s the rule that matters most: the number has to stay active until the move is finished. If the agency cancels the account, or you cancel the agency, before the port completes, the number can be released and you can lose it. Make “keep my numbers active until the port completes” an explicit line in your notice.

Some numbers are leased by a reseller and can’t be ported at all. Ask early. If a number on your trucks turns out to be unmovable, you’ll want months of warning to change it.

Check Who Owns Your Google Ads Account

Sign in at ads.google.com with your own Google account. If you see your account, check your access level (Google Ads Help). Admin is the one you want: it can add and remove users and unlink a manager account. Standard can edit campaigns but not manage users. Read-only, Billing and Email-only give you less.

Then check who pays Google. Open billing and see whose card or bank account is on the payments profile. If it’s yours, the account is effectively yours, and leaving is mostly a matter of removing the agency’s access. If you’ve only ever paid the agency, and they paid Google, the account may live under their billing. Ask them to make you an admin and move billing to your own payment method. If they won’t, you can open a new account. You’ll keep your website and its conversion tracking, but the old account’s history stays behind, so export your campaign reports first.

Google requires agencies to use a separate account for each advertiser they manage (Google Ads Policies), so your ads should already be in an account of their own, even if you can’t see it yet.

The Order to Move Them

Here’s the order we use. It starts the slow things first and saves cancelling for the end.

1. Collect what you can see on your own. Logins, screenshots of DNS records, your profile’s people list, your Ads access level and billing, and a list of every tracking number and where it’s used.
2. Ask to be made an owner of everything, without announcing that you’re leaving. “I’d like owner access to my accounts for my own records” is a normal request.
3. Start the domain move and the number moves. These take the longest.
4. Transfer primary ownership of the Business Profile once your 7 days as an owner have passed.
5. Move Ads billing and take admin access, or export the reports and set up your own account.
6. Send your formal notice, following your contract’s terms, with a list of exactly what you need handed over.
7. Cancel only after every number has moved, the domain is in your account and your new site or provider is live.
8. Clean up. Remove the agency from your profile, your Ads account, your registrar, your analytics and Search Console, and change every shared password.

A Notice Email You Can Copy

Keep it short, polite and specific. Name every account. Vague requests get vague answers.

Subject: Notice of cancellation and account hand-over for [Business Name]

Hi [Name],

Thank you for your work on our marketing. This email is our written notice that we're ending our agreement, effective [date, per the notice period in our contract].

To make the hand-over smooth, please complete the following by [date]:

1. Domain: move [yourbusiness.com] into our registrar account at [registrar], account [account email], or send the transfer authorization code. Please send a copy of all current DNS records first.
2. Google Business Profile: make [owner email] the primary owner of our profile, and confirm once it's done.
3. Call tracking: keep all of our tracking numbers active until our port or transfer is complete, and authorize the transfer of these numbers: [list numbers].
4. Google Ads: give [owner email] admin access to our account [account ID], and confirm whose payment method is on file.
5. Website: send an export of our site content, images, form submissions and lead history, plus admin access to our analytics and Search Console.

Please let me know if anything on this list needs something more from us. We'd like to keep this simple and friendly.

Thanks,
[Your name]
[Business Name]
[Phone]

Send it by email so there’s a record, and if your contract names another method for notice, use that as well.

The Checklist

If you hit a wall, it’s usually one account and one person who isn’t answering. Write to them again with that single account named in the subject line. In my experience, that’s what gets it done.