Somebody is currently managing my adwords but I'm not happy with them. I do have access to our adwords account but they are listed as my Client Manager and my access is restricted. I'm afraid that if I tell them I want to terminate my business with them, they will put up a fuss and take away access to the account / not unlink the account or whatever. I need to know if there's an easy way to either: a) "fire" them as our managers on Google, so that the account remains intact and fully functional b) Make a backup of all our campaigns so I can set up a new account and import our existing campaigns, budgets, etc Some advise, anybody?
You should have a contract which protects you from such unscrupulous behavior. If you are worried demand full access to your account, then just change the password.
What you can do is ask for standard access instead of just reporting. Then open another adwords account. Using Editor, copy all of your campaigns over. That way you have a backup. Then just fire him. He will obviously stop running your ads, and you can take over where he left off with your own account. Also try to pull a lot of reports before he leaves so you can see exactly what keywords have been doing decent for you. If you are looking for a new manager that actually cares and has a great track record, I'd be interested in checking out your project and niche. PM me if you'd like to talk. Good luck either way.
But if you're firing the manager, it's because the campaigns aren't doing well ( i would assume) So why would you copy any of the old stuff? I'd just copy the keywords and present them to the next manager, or just use it to do research yourself.
I would copy them over as a backup, and then duplicate them. within the duplicate copy, take out all the adgroups and keywords that were blatantly bad from before. then you can delete your backup and you have an account that will run better than the previous and ready for more building and optimization. i guess u dont even have to do the backup step, but i like to be safe. i would at the least highly recommend pulling down many reports though. imo there really is no "bad" campaign, as you can learn something from just about every account, theres only ineffective or effective. theres a lot more to adwords than just the right keywords.
You could line up a new Agency, and ask them to liaise with your old agency to hand over the account. Thus dropping the problem into somebody else's lap.