One of the most annoying things we have to deal with on a (fairly) regular basis with Blue Ion clients is getting access to various Meta properties and tools so we can manage their advertising.

This isn’t because of the clients, it’s because of Meta. It’s pretty much always a headache and 3x more clicks than you would think necessary.

Before I outline the process we’ve landed on lately (for now?), a few ground rules we play by:

• This assumes the client already has a Meta Business Manager setup and they can access it (this can be a big assumption). If one doesn’t exist we’ll help create one for/with them.
• We believe that these accounts belong to the client and if they choose to move away from us as an agency, they should easily be able to take the accounts with them. We are working on their behalf, they aren’t renting their advertising from us.
• We set it up so the clients are billed direct by Meta, we don’t charge passthrough markups or CPC fees (see above point).

Now, on to the access!

We’ve found the easiest method is having the client add us to their Business Manager as a partner (official documentation here).

We grab our business ID from the main business settings URL for our agency Business Manager. This is the most reliable way I’ve found to get it in an easy copy-paste format.

We then share that with the client along with the documentation link.

They then access their Business Manager settings, navigate to Partners in the left menu, click the blue “Add” button, and “Give a partner access to your assets.”

The assets that need to be shared may change on a case-by-case basis, but we ask for:

• Facebook Page
• Instagram account
• Ad Account
• Pixel / Dataset

The ideal is to get manage access for all assets, but we just request the highest level they’re comfortable granting us.

Then we wait for them to appear in our Partners list and assign out asset access as needed.

Voilà! Happy advertising!

& stay curious