Who owns your ad account — and why it matters.

If you're a small business owner paying Marketing 360 (owned by Madwire, LLC), the most important thing to understand about the relationship usually isn't the monthly price. It's who owns the ad accounts — and how that one structural detail shapes the work you get.

Your ad accounts live in their house

With Marketing 360, your Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Meta Ads campaigns run inside Madwire's manager account — not an account you own. You can see performance in their dashboard, but the underlying accounts, and everything built up inside them, sit with them.

You can verify this independently. Go to the Google Ads Transparency Center and search for your domain. If the advertiser of record listed is "Madwire, LLC" rather than your business name, that's the confirmation: Madwire is the entity buying the ad space, and you're their customer, not Google's.

Why ownership changes the incentives

Here's the part that matters most, and it has nothing to do with any one fee. When the agency owns the account and gets paid to manage your ad spend, the easiest way to grow the relationship is to grow the spend — not to make each dollar work harder.

Think about what that rewards. Tightening targeting, cutting wasted clicks, and lowering your cost per lead all shrink the number the relationship is built around. The careful, unglamorous optimization work makes the account smaller; adding budget makes it bigger. None of this requires anyone to act in bad faith — the structure just quietly points the easy path toward more spend instead of better results.

And because the data that would let you judge the work — or take it somewhere else — lives in their account, it's hard to hold the work to a standard you can actually measure.

What leaving actually costs

When you decide to leave Marketing 360, you face a choice most owners don't anticipate at signup: you can take yourself and your budget, but you can't take the account. The campaign structure, keyword lists, Quality Scores, conversion history, and audience lists stay behind.

Starting a new account isn't the same as picking up where you left off. Quality Scores take time to rebuild, and the bidding algorithms need conversion history to optimize well — so the first months in a fresh account are effectively a tax on the decision to leave. That friction is exactly what makes the arrangement sticky.

This isn't unique to Marketing 360 — plenty of large agencies are built the same way. It's a legitimate model. It's just worth understanding before you sign, not after.

What ownership-first looks like

The alternative is simple, even if it's less common. Your Google Ads account is created in your name. Your billing is on your own card. You pay Google directly for ad spend, at Google's rates. The agency charges a flat fee for the work and runs your account as your operator — not its landlord.

Under this model:

• Your campaign history, Quality Scores, and conversion data are yours.
• If you leave, you take your account with you. There's no starting over.
• The agency keeps the account only by doing work worth renewing — because you can walk with everything.
• You can confirm at any time that the advertiser in the Google Ads Transparency Center is your business, not your agency.

The questions to ask any agency before signing

Whichever agency you're evaluating — including us — these surface how the relationship really works:

1. Who owns the Google Ads account? It should be created under your Google account, not the agency's. You should be able to log in directly and see every campaign, every dollar, and all conversion data.
2. Who is the advertiser of record in the Google Ads Transparency Center? Search your domain at adstransparency.google.com. If the advertiser listed is the agency name — not your business — the account is in their hands, not yours.
3. What happens to my account if I leave? The answer should be: you take it with you. If it involves them retaining the account, ask why.
4. How does the agency make more — when I spend more, or when my results improve? The honest answer tells you which way the incentives point before you ever sign.

This isn't just about Marketing 360

Marketing 360 and Madwire are large enough to name specifically, and their setup is publicly documented through the Google Ads Transparency Center. But the same patterns show up at agencies of every size.

The point isn't to single out one company. It's to give you a way to evaluate any marketing relationship — including ours — on more than price, so you understand what you're actually buying and who ends up holding the keys.

If you want to see what your current setup looks like — who owns your ad account, what your tracking is missing, and what your competitors are actually running — the free Site Marketing Scorecard is the fastest way to find out. No sales call, no obligation.