In my experience, parting ways with an agency often feels like pulling the plug on analytics. Access to accounts suddenly disappears, dashboards stop updating, and the knowledge of how everything was set up vanishes with the team that managed it.
The business is left staring at broken reports with no context for past decisions.
Why is this such a problem?
When data lives in silos controlled by the agency, the moment they leave, analytics unravels:
• CRM, BI, and ad platforms show conflicting numbers.
• Historical reports lose consistency.
• Duplicates and mismatches creep in.
The result: the company effectively loses its customer history and has to rebuild the puzzle from scratch.
What’s the real lesson?
Analytics shouldn’t be owned by an external vendor. Without a central data source, shared metric definitions, and documented processes, every transition becomes a crisis. The way out is to design analytics so it survives agency changes — with or without their team in the picture.
So how do you fix it?
The playbook I use with clients looks like this:
• Find an adequate contractor.
• Consolidate all data in a single warehouse.
• Document every source, transformation, and ETL process.
• Assign internal owners for data consistency.
• Build a migration plan for dashboards and reports.
• Train the in-house team before the agency exit.
• Run a post-handoff audit to ensure continuity.
Analytics should serve the business, not disappear with a contract. With the right setup, agency transitions stop being a nightmare — and start being just another project milestone.
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