Your digital assets

The most important question nobody asks an agency: who owns what when you leave?

This is the unglamorous page. There are no clever campaigns on it, no growth curves, no creative. There is only the question that decides whether your marketing is an asset you are building or a dependency you are renting, and our answer to it, stated as commitments you can hold us to. If you have been burned before, this page was written for you.

Read our standard See the transparency argument

How businesses get burned

The horror patterns are common because they are profitable

When an agency relationship ends badly, it almost never ends over the quality of the ads. It ends over custody. Across the industry, and we will name the patterns, not the perpetrators, the same handful of stories repeats, and every one of them was preventable with a single question asked on day one.

The hostage ad account

The agency runs your Google and Meta campaigns from an account the agency owns. Years of campaign history, audiences and optimisation live there. When you leave, the account stays behind, and with it everything the money bought. You paid for the spend; the agency kept the learning. Starting over means starting from zero.

Read our ownership standard

The lost pixel

A pixel is the small piece of code that teaches ad platforms which visitors become customers. When it sits in an agency's container and the relationship ends, the signal history is lost and the platforms' learning resets. Your next agency inherits a machine with amnesia, and your ads get more expensive precisely when you can least afford it.

Learn how the pixel works

The captive domain

The worst of all: the domain registered in the agency's name "to make things easier". The business's website, email and years of search reputation now hang from a registration the owner does not control. Some businesses have had to negotiate to buy back their own name. A domain is title deed, not stationery: treat it that way.

Check the asset register

The flattened files

The logo arrives as a small PNG; the brochure as a locked PDF. The working files, the editable originals every future designer will need, are "retained by the studio". Reordering a banner now means paying the original agency or redrawing your own identity from scratch. Final exports are the photograph; working files are the negatives. Insist on both.

See the storage commitment

The unshared login

Your Google Business Profile, often a local firm's single most valuable listing, managed for years from an agency email nobody at your company ever saw. The person leaves the agency, the agency loses the login, and your own shopfront on Google drifts unmanaged while you queue through a recovery process to prove you are you.

See how a profile is tended

The wandering data

Customer lists exported "for campaign setup" onto laptops and third-party tools you never audited, and never recalled when the relationship ended. Beyond the commercial exposure, this is where POPIA, South Africa's data-protection law, stops being a compliance heading and becomes your personal problem, because the responsibility stayed with you even when the spreadsheet did not.

Read POPIA in plain terms

None of this is usually malice at the start. It is convenience hardening into leverage. An agency that controls your assets has a retention strategy that does not depend on doing good work, and that, more than any single horror story, is the real cost. We built our whole transparency model to make the opposite true: the only thing keeping a client with us should be the results they can verify themselves.

The AutoHive standard

Our commitments, in writing, from day one

These are not policies we aspire to. They are commitments we operate by, and they appear in our onboarding documents so you can hold us to them contractually, not just morally.

You own every account from day one. Your Google Ads account, your Meta Business portfolio, your pixel and Conversions API, your Google Business Profile, your domain, your analytics: every one is created in your name, under your email, on your billing. If an account already exists in someone else's custody, recovering it into yours is our first job, before a rand of new spend.

We hold manager access only. We work inside your accounts as invited managers, the same way a bookkeeper works in your accounting file without owning your bank account. Revoke our access and everything stays exactly where it always was: with you. That single structural choice removes our leverage, which is precisely the point.

Your creative lives in versioned storage. Every logo, layout, video and working file we produce for you is stored in versioned asset storage you can access: not just the final exports, the working files. Versioned means earlier states are kept, so nothing is ever overwritten into oblivion and the history of your brand remains yours to inherit, audit or hand to a successor.

Credential handover is documented. Every account, login and access grant is recorded in a register you hold a copy of. If we were hit by the proverbial bus, or you simply chose to leave, nothing about your marketing estate would need to be discovered, guessed or begged for.

Audience data is handled under POPIA. The Protection of Personal Information Act is South Africa's data-protection law, and in marketing terms it means three disciplines: consent, meaning people on your lists chose to be there; minimisation, meaning we collect only what the marketing actually needs, and no more; purpose limitation, meaning data gathered for one purpose is not quietly repurposed for another. Your customer data is yours, held for your purposes, and it leaves with you.

Off-boarding is documented at onboarding. The day we start, you receive the written procedure for how we leave: what gets handed over, in what format, in what timeframe, and what access we revoke on our own side. Writing the exit before the work begins is the strongest promise we know how to make: it means we intend to be kept for our results, never for our grip.

The asset register: what to check, asset by asset

Use this table on us, or on anyone. For each asset, one question decides everything: whose name is on it?

Each digital marketing asset, who must own it, and the question that verifies ownership
Asset	Who must own it	The question that verifies it
Google Ads account	You: your billing, your email	Can you log in today, without asking anyone, and see every campaign?
Meta Business portfolio	You: with the agency as invited partner	Who is listed as the portfolio owner: your business, or theirs?
Pixel & Conversions API	You: created inside your own portfolio	If the agency vanished tonight, would the signal history remain yours?
Google Business Profile	You: agency added as manager	Is the primary owner an email address your business controls?
Domain name	You: registered to your entity	Whose name and email appear at the registrar? Yours, or "for convenience" theirs?
Website & hosting	You: access held even if managed for you	Do you hold the hosting credentials in your own register?
Creative & working files	You: versioned storage you can open	Could a new designer start tomorrow from the originals, not the exports?
Audience & customer data	You: held under POPIA, for your purposes	Do you know every place a copy of your customer list lives right now?

Eight rows, one pattern. If the answer to any verification question is "I would have to ask the agency", that row is not yours yet, whatever the contract says. Ownership you cannot exercise without permission is called access, and access is what the agency is supposed to have.

What you hold from day one

The onboarding pack: three documents, no ceremony

Commitments become real when they arrive as paper. Before the first campaign runs, every AutoHive client holds three documents: none of them long, all of them boring in exactly the way title deeds are boring.

The credential register

Every account, who owns it, which email controls it, and what level of access we hold. Updated whenever anything changes, and yours to check against the asset table above whenever suspicion or curiosity strikes. Most clients read it once and sleep better indefinitely.

Check the asset table

The storage map

Where your creative lives, how versions are kept, and how you reach it without us. Working files and finals, organised by asset, with history preserved, so the brand you are building accumulates in a vault you hold the key to, not in a folder on someone's laptop.

Read the brand chapter

The exit dossier

The off-boarding procedure, written while everyone still likes each other: what is handed over, in what format, in what timeframe, and what we delete on our side, including audience data, confirmed in writing under POPIA. The document we hope you never use, and insist you always have.

See what the setup fee includes

Notice what is absent: nothing in the pack requires our cooperation at the moment you need it. That is deliberate. A safety net that depends on the goodwill of the party you are leaving is not a net: it is a request. Yours works on a bad day, with lawyers in the room, which is the only standard worth building to.

Why we work this way

Ownership is the trust argument in operational form

An agency should be easy to leave and worth staying with. That sentence is the whole philosophy; everything above is just its paperwork.

Everything else on this site rests on that same idea: the CRM you can audit daily, the pricing published in public, the platform recommendations that sometimes tell you not to spend. Asset ownership is where that idea stops being a slogan and becomes structure. A promise costs nothing; an account registered in your name costs us our leverage, permanently, and that is why it is believable.

If you are evaluating any agency, including us, take this page with you and ask the questions in order: Who owns the ad account? Where does the pixel live? Whose name is on the domain? Where are the working files? What does off-boarding look like, in writing? A good agency will answer in five minutes. A hesitant one has just answered too. And if you have already been burned and are untangling custody of your own accounts right now, that recovery work is something we do: bring us the mess before you bring us the budget.

Questions burned clients ask first

My current agency owns my ad account. Am I stuck?

Rarely stuck, usually stalled. Depending on the platform, campaign structures, creative and some assets can be rebuilt or transferred into an account you own, and anything genuinely trapped is at least documented so the loss is known rather than discovered. It is untidy work and we will not pretend otherwise, but every month it is postponed, the account you do not own grows more valuable and your leverage grows smaller. Start the recovery before the renewal.

Does holding only manager access limit what you can do for me?

No, and that is the honest beauty of it. Manager access on Google, Meta and your Business Profile permits everything the work requires: building campaigns, editing budgets, installing pixels, answering reviews. The only thing it does not permit is holding your business hostage. We gave up nothing except the leverage, which is exactly the part an agency should never have had.

What does handover actually look like if we part ways?

You already have it: that is the point of documenting off-boarding at onboarding. In practice: our manager access is revoked, the credential register you hold is confirmed current, the versioned storage with every working file is confirmed accessible, and any copies of audience data on our side are deleted and confirmed in writing. No meetings required, no goodwill required. The exit works even on a bad day, which is the only kind of day exits happen on.

Is any of this priced separately?

No. Account architecture in your name, the pixel and Conversions API in your portfolio, and the onboarding pack are all part of the once-off Google and Meta setup fee described on the pricing page. Ownership is how we build, not an add-on we sell. If a term in this answer is unfamiliar, the glossary explains every one of them in plain language with South African examples.

Why would an agency publish a page like this?

Because the economics of honesty are better than they look. An agency that cannot hold clients by custody must hold them by results, which forces us to be good, visibly, every week, in a CRM you can audit. Publishing the standard also costs our worst competitors something, and we are entirely comfortable with that.

One clear next step

Ask for the asset ownership audit.

Tell us who currently holds your ad accounts, pixel, Google Business Profile, domain and files, or tell us you are not sure, which is the most common and most honest answer. We will map what you own, what you do not, and what it takes to bring everything home. No spend required, no strings attached: your hive, your honey.

Request the audit

Or read how you would audit our work daily if we did work together.