There will be time when a client want to claim an ad account from agency’s business manager, just like one of our client not long ago, or ad account was mistakenly claimed by agency’s business manager and need to be transferred back to the client for various reason.
Fortunately, we have feature named “add new ad account” in our business manager, which serve to claim ad account connected to a personal account. But the thing is, it won’t help if the ad account is already claimed by another business manager, it will only work if the ad account is still owned by personal account.
Error when trying to claim ad account from another business manager
Many have asked solutions for this problem, like:
- How do I transfer an ad account or it’s data to a different business manager?
- How do I change the ownership of an account(s) in business manager?
One article by Carolina Valdez on searchenginepeople.com claims you can transfer ad account between business if you provided the right permissions to the target business manager’s owner. Of course, we tried this.
It won’t work if your ad account had been claimed by a business manager.
Thus, there is no direct solution to transfer ad account to another business manager, except by deleting the business that claimed it. Yes, you read that right, deleting your business manager. It is a big problem if you have a lot of things done there and it will take some trick depending on how the ad account came into your Business manager.
Transferring ad account by deleting business manager is not really a straight forward process. It depends on how your ad account got into your business manager:
- If ad account was claimed from a personal account
Permanently delete your business manager and the ad account will be transferred back to the personal account that made it. Made sure you remove all assets (pixels, offline audiences, product catalogs, etc) beside ad account itself that are in the business manager or it will not work.
- If ad account was made from the business manager itself
You need to contact the Facebook Business support team to do this. We did tried to delete it manually, but it never ended up success and no clear error explanation being told.
The only error message ‘your business can’t be deleted at this time’ (19th July 2017)
This might have happened because the ad account don’t know where it will be transferred after the Business Manager deleted (Facebook Internal Ad Team was the one mentioned this is why we cannot delete the Business Manager ourself). Only Facebook Business ad support will be helpful at this point provided you have good reason to do this. They’re very helpful in this case.
They might ask your written approval in the email. For simplicity sake, you can copy and modify the following:
Hi Jane,
I’m Mickeel Pramono, requesting the transference of:
Ad account : 9902234567899
Current Business Manager ID : 8787345678902
Current Business Manager’s email : ping@lezenda.com
to
Business Manager ID : 2093345678789Thanks a lot.
Deleting your Business Manager is not reversible, you will lose all assets in it.
Always make a separated ad account for your agency
No matter whether you create it from your business manager or the client’s, create a new ad account for your service. This is to separate any history from any previous ad performance the client ever made and help you/them get better performance from the service you provided easier.
Use client’s Facebook ad account
Facebook recommend us as agency that we should only request access to ad account from our client’s business managers. Thing is, most (or all) our clients don’t even know what is business manager. Requesting access into their Facebook page is a hassle for them already.
Thus, our initial approach regarding this problem is to make business manager for each of our new clients just in case one day the customer want to claim their ad account. But after doing this for several business using several staff accounts, we noticed that Facebook limited the number of businesses we can make only for 2 businesses and also making new business for each client lead to another problem, we need claim at least one main Facebook page for each business. Meaning this is not the right way to manage business or ad accounts as agency.
In the end, we stick to meeting and setting up client’s account to move on to business manager and request access into it. In case customer is too burdened to do that, we will make ad account in our agency’s Business manager.
Hope it help. Claps for all of us!