Switching Facebook Ad Agencies: A Checklist for Insurance Agents

Most agents who leave an ad agency do it the same way. They get frustrated for a couple of months, send an email that says they are done, and then find out over the next two weeks everything they did not think to ask for. The lead routing stops working. Somebody at the old agency still has admin on the page. The campaigns got deleted on the way out. A few leads that came in during the handoff never reached anyone.

None of that is dramatic, and none of it has to happen. Switching agencies is mostly a sequencing problem: what you collect before you give notice, what order you change access in, and how you make sure a lead that comes in on cutover day still rings your phone. This is the checklist I would want in front of me.

One assumption up front: this post is about leaving cleanly when the ad account, page, and pixel are in your name. If they are not, the job is different and harder, and I cover it near the end.

The three ways a switch goes wrong

Almost every bad agency exit falls into one of three buckets. Knowing them makes the checklist below make sense.

• You lose the asset. The account, page, or pixel turns out to belong to the agency, or the campaigns get deleted, and the history you paid for is gone.
• You lose leads in transit. Lead routing was wired through the old agency's tools. The day you remove them, leads keep landing in Meta, but nothing pushes them to your phone. Nobody notices for days.
• You reset more than you had to. The new agency tears everything down and starts from zero when a lot of what was there could have been kept, studied, or duplicated.

The first one is about ownership. The second is about order of operations. The third is about briefing the next person well. Each gets its own step.

Step 1: Take inventory before you give notice

The best time to collect everything is while the relationship is still friendly. Once you have said you are leaving, you are asking a vendor who just lost your business to do favors. Most will. Some will drag their feet. Do this first.

Read the contract

Look for four things: the notice period, what happens to work in progress, who owns the creative, and how ad spend is billed. If spend runs through the agency's card rather than yours, find out how the last invoice gets settled and when your campaigns stop. If the contract says the agency owns the ad copy and images, you may need to write new creative, which is worth knowing before the new agency asks for it.

Export every lead

Pull every lead into a file you control, not just the ones already in your CRM. Instant form leads carry a lead ID, a form ID, and a timestamp. Keep all three. That is your record of when and how each person asked to be contacted, and it matters if anyone ever questions a call. I went into why in the guide to keeping consent records.

Do not wait on this one. Meta only keeps instant form leads available for download for a limited window, which its help center has put at 90 days. If routing ever broke and leads sat in the lead center, older ones may already be out of reach.

Get the record of what ran

Ask for a plain report: which campaigns ran, which ads and audiences won, what the cost per lead did over time, and what got tried and dropped. If the account is yours, most of this is already in Ads Manager, but a summary from the person who ran it saves the next person a month of guessing. Ask for the original creative files too, the images and video, not just screenshots.

Map the lead routing

Write down, step by step, how a lead gets from the Meta form to your phone. Is it a direct CRM integration? A Zapier zap? A GoHighLevel sub-account the agency set up? Whose login is it under? This is the step agents skip, and it is the one that causes the lead gap. If any link in that chain lives in the agency's account, it will stop working when they leave.

Step 2: Audit who has access to what

Before anyone gets added or removed, look at the current state of every asset. You need admin access to the business portfolio that should own them.

The people list is the one that surprises agents. Agencies often add individual staff to a client portfolio rather than, or in addition to, adding the agency as a partner. Removing the partner does not remove those people. Neither does firing the agency. You have to take them off yourself.

Step 3: Cut over in the right order

The rule is simple: the new setup has to be receiving leads before the old one stops. Here is the order that keeps a lead from falling through.

1. Add the new agency as a partner. Give them the access they need on the ad account, page, and pixel. Both agencies have access for a short overlap. That is fine.
2. Let the new agency review before touching anything. They should read what is running, look at the history, and tell you what they plan to keep, pause, and rebuild.
3. Rebuild lead routing under your own logins. Whatever pushes leads to your phone and CRM should run on accounts you hold, so it survives the next switch too.
4. Send a test lead and time it. Fill out your own form from a phone. Confirm it lands in your CRM and alerts your phone within a minute or two. Do not move on until it does.
5. Pause, do not delete, the old campaigns. More on this below.
6. Remove the old agency. Take the partner off, then remove any of their staff under People, then check each asset for leftover access.
7. Clean up lead access and integrations. Remove any CRM or tool under Leads Access that belonged to the old agency, and turn off any zaps or webhooks they built.
8. Send a second test lead. Same test, after the old agency is fully out. If anything in the chain secretly depended on them, this is where you find out.

Steps 4 and 8 are the whole point. A lead that sits for hours is a much weaker lead than one you call in the first few minutes, which is the argument in the speed-to-lead post. A switch that quietly breaks routing for a week costs more than whatever made you want to switch.

Why you pause instead of delete

Some departing agencies delete their campaigns on the way out, sometimes out of habit and sometimes out of spite. Some new agencies want to delete everything so they can start clean. Push back on both.

A paused campaign keeps its results visible. The new agency can see which ads and audiences produced leads at what cost, duplicate a winner into a new structure, or turn the old one back on for a test. A deleted campaign cannot be restarted. The history in your account is part of what you paid for, and it costs nothing to keep.

Expect some reset regardless. New ad sets go through Meta's learning phase, and a new agency will make changes. The first few weeks under new management are often bumpier than the last few under the old one. That is normal, and it is a reason to judge the new agency over a month, not a week. What you keep by owning the account is the pixel data and the account history, which make the reset shorter than starting from nothing.

If the old agency owns the account

Run the access audit and you may find the ad account, the pixel, or even the page sitting in the agency's business portfolio. In that case there is no clean handoff, because there is nothing to hand off. You can be given access. You cannot easily be given ownership of an ad account.

The practical move is to collect everything in Step 1, ask for the page to be assigned to your business if they control it, and have the new agency build a fresh ad account and pixel in your portfolio. You will start cold. That is the cost of the original setup, and the reason who owns the ad account is the first question to settle with any agency, before a dollar is spent. Make sure it is settled correctly this time, so the next switch, if there is one, is the easy kind.

Stay with your current agency if…

Switching has a real cost, so it is worth being honest about when not to.

• The problem is the first month. New campaigns are uneven while Meta learns. If you are three weeks in and frustrated, a new agency starts the same learning over. Give it a fair run.
• The leads are fine and the problem is on your side. If you are calling leads hours late or giving up after one attempt, a new agency will not fix that. Check your own speed and follow-up before you blame the campaigns.
• You own everything and they answer when you call. If the account is yours, the reporting is honest, and you can get a straight answer about what is working, that is worth more than a pitch from the next agency promising a lower cost per lead.
• Your account is restricted. Switching in the middle of an appeal adds confusion. Resolve the restriction first, then decide.

What to look for in the next one

The checklist above gets a lot easier when the next agency sets things up so leaving would be easy. That sounds backward, but it is the best sign you can get: an agency that builds in your account, puts your card on billing, routes leads to systems you hold, and does not need you trapped to keep you. The rest of the screening, from reporting to who actually builds the ads, is in the questions to ask a Facebook ad agency.

That is how FEXads, our ad-management service, works. A real person hand-builds every campaign inside your own ad account. You keep the page, the pixel, the ad account, and every lead. The FEXmagnet portal shows your spend, leads, cost per lead, sales, and profit, updated nightly, and logging a sale takes one click, which also feeds your pixel. If you ever leave, everything you built stays exactly where it is. That is the difference between renting a lead flow and owning one.

Frequently asked questions

What should I do before leaving my Facebook ad agency?

Read the contract for notice periods and ownership terms, export every lead with its form ID and timestamp, confirm who owns the ad account, page, and pixel, ask for a report of what ran, and map exactly how leads reach your phone today. Do it while the relationship is still friendly.

Should I delete the old agency's campaigns?

No. Pause them. Paused campaigns keep their results visible and can be studied, duplicated, or turned back on. Deleted campaigns cannot be restarted, and the history is part of what you paid for.

How do I remove the old agency from my Meta account?

In Business Settings, remove the agency under Partners, then remove any of their staff under Users, then check the ad account, page, and pixel for leftover access. Review Leads Access under Integrations too. Do this only after the new setup is receiving leads.

Will switching agencies reset my results?

Partly. New or heavily edited ad sets go back through the learning phase, so expect a few uneven weeks. If the account and pixel are yours, the history carries over and the reset is shorter. If the old agency owned the account, you start from zero.