Changing marketplace ad agencies should feel like a clean handover. One operator leaves, another operator enters, campaigns keep running, and the brand finally gets the control it was missing. Lovely idea. Risky week.
The expensive part of an agency exit is rarely the goodbye call. It is the quiet mess after access changes: a negative keyword loses its reason, an automation rule keeps running without an owner, a campaign budget looks low because last month’s pacing logic is still active, a MediaMarkt package is approved without the margin file that justified it, or an ex-operator still has enough rights to “help” after the contract has ended.
The named mistake I see is treating revocation as an IT task instead of a profit-control event. Someone removes a user from Amazon Ads, changes a bol.com login, asks finance to cancel an invoice, and calls the switch done. But the advertising account still contains months of decisions that were made for specific reasons: stock shortages, margin resets, price changes, brand defence commitments, competitor pressure, failed tests and temporary budget caps. If those reasons are not preserved, the new operator may rebuild the account by looking only at current ACOS. That is how “fresh optimisation” accidentally deletes the account’s memory.
My stance: every Amazon, bol or MediaMarkt account spending roughly €5K or more per month needs an agency exit revocation room. Not a polite offboarding checklist. A controlled room that decides which rights are removed now, which evidence is exported, which automations are frozen, which decisions expire, and what the new operator is allowed to change during the first two weeks.
This guide is written for brands in the Netherlands and Belgium that use a managed Advertising Service, or are moving from one marketplace advertising partner to another. The goal is simple: remove the old agency without removing the profit logic the account still needs.
What existing agency-switching advice gets right
Most PPC switching guides give sensible general advice. Check the contract. Confirm who owns the ad accounts. Export reports, keyword lists, creatives, conversion settings and audience data. Make sure the new agency has access before the old one disappears. Avoid a reporting gap. Document what was running.
That is useful, especially for Google Ads or Meta accounts where conversion tracking and account ownership are often the biggest risks. Marketplace advertising has all of those risks too, but adds three more: SKU economics, marketplace operations and platform-specific campaign memory.
BidX’s PPC controlling content is a good example of what the optimisation layer covers well. It explains target ACOS, conversion rate, maximum CPC and campaign budgets, and warns that budget automation can reward the wrong campaigns if cost or ACOS is interpreted blindly. Flywheel’s handoff content is useful on the client-service side: communication, asset transfer and making the handover painless. Broader PPC agency-switching guides correctly say to gather campaign data before the switch and clarify ownership of accounts and assets.
What they usually miss is the revocation layer after a marketplace agency relationship ends. They explain how to move access. They rarely explain how to preserve why the account looks the way it looks.
That “why” is where profit lives.
The exit problem: marketplace accounts contain hidden decisions
A mature Amazon, bol or MediaMarkt ad account is not just a list of campaigns. It is a stack of decisions. A low bid might mean “keyword is weak”. It might also mean “SKU margin dropped after inbound freight changed”. A paused campaign might mean “bad performance”. It might also mean “hold until NL stock lands”. A broad match campaign might look wasteful. It might be the only place the account is harvesting new German-language search terms for a Belgian expansion.
If a new operator enters without the decision history, they will read structure as performance. That is dangerous.
Take a simple example. A Sponsored Products campaign has spent €620 in the last 30 days at 31% ACOS. The SKU’s loaded break-even ACOS is 24%, so the campaign looks like an obvious bid-down candidate. But the previous agency had capped it temporarily because the product had only 12 days of FBA stock and inbound replenishment was stuck in FC processing. Two weeks later, stock is healthy again and the same campaign can return to harvest mode. If the exit package does not record that reason, the new operator may judge the campaign incorrectly.
FiveX solves this by connecting campaign performance with profitability dashboards, inventory insights and campaign logs. In a managed Advertising Service setup, the weekly decision is not “what did ACOS do?” It is “does the SKU still have margin, stock and role permission for the next euro?”
The revocation room: five exits that must happen in order
Do not revoke everything at once and then hope the new team can reconstruct the account. A good exit uses sequence.
1. Remove spend authority first
The first right to remove is the right to move money: budgets, bids, campaign status, automation activation and retail media approvals. View access can remain briefly if the contract allows it, but spend authority should end at the agreed time. There is no strategic reason for a previous operator to keep edit rights after the decision owner has changed.
For Amazon, that means checking both advertising console rights and any Seller Central or Vendor Central permissions that indirectly affect ads, such as product eligibility, promotions, pricing or inventory views. For bol, it means checking the advertising surface as well as account-level access that can influence product availability and campaign setup. For MediaMarkt retail media, it means knowing who can approve packages, send product selections or commit budget with the retailer or network partner.
2. Export decision memory before structure changes
Performance exports are not enough. The exit room needs search-term winners, negative keyword rationale, bid ceilings, campaign roles, stock vetoes, budget caps, test hypotheses and rollback notes. If those live only in a slide deck or a Slack thread, they are not operational memory.
In FiveX, campaign logs and advertising reports make this cleaner because bid changes, budget changes, Ads AI recommendations and performance movements can be reviewed next to SKU margin and stock cover. The new operator should inherit the argument behind a change, not only the changed number.
3. Freeze automations before judging performance
The most chaotic exits happen when rules keep running during the handover. A rule that lowers bids above 35% ACOS may be sensible for harvest SKUs, but terrible for a launch SKU that has a signed learning budget. A budget pacing rule may protect the month, but it can also starve the new agency’s first test window.
The default should be a 7- to 14-day automation freeze for any rule without a current owner. That does not mean stopping all optimisation. It means rules need a named owner, a SKU permission label and an expiry date before they are allowed to act again.
4. Separate “keep”, “question” and “delete”
A new agency often wants to clean the account. Good instinct, dangerous timing. During the first two weeks, the account should use three labels: keep, question and delete later. Very little should be deleted immediately unless it creates active risk.
Why? Because marketplace ad accounts carry memory in messy places. An old manual campaign may contain search terms that explain why a negative exists. A paused bol campaign may show why BE was separated from NL. A MediaMarkt product list may show why one SKU was excluded despite looking like a hero product in Amazon reports.
5. Reopen budget only after the first profit board
The new operator should not be rewarded for activity in week one. They should be rewarded for building the new decision system. Before budgets expand, run a profit board: SKU margin, stock cover, campaign role, search evidence, automation status, marketplace role and owner. Only then should the account reopen scale permissions.
Named example 1: NorthPeak Home and the Amazon memory trap
NorthPeak Home spends €8,900 per month on Amazon Ads for kitchen storage products. The previous agency built a tidy structure: brand defence, generic harvest, competitor ASIN targeting and launch campaigns. On paper, the account looks manageable. The problem is that most of the decision memory sits outside the account.
One hero SKU sells for €39.95, with €12.40 product cost, €6.10 Amazon fees and fulfilment, €2.20 average return reserve and €3.15 inbound and handling cost. Loaded contribution margin before ads is €16.10, so the break-even ACOS is roughly 40%. But the commercial team has a target margin requirement that caps advertising at 24% ACOS because wholesale inventory for Q4 has to be protected.
The old agency had set a max CPC of €0.78 on the generic exact campaign, added “cheap plastic” as a negative phrase, and capped competitor ASIN spend at €45 per day. Those changes look conservative until you read the reason: the campaign was intentionally protecting a margin floor while stock cover sat at 18 days and a Prime deal was coming.
The exit room decision: remove edit and automation rights immediately, keep view access for 10 business days, export the search-term ledger, preserve the €0.78 max CPC as a “question” item, and block any budget increase until FiveX inventory insights show at least 28 days of cover. The new operator can still optimise. They just cannot erase the old logic before proving it expired.
Named example 2: CanalBaby and the bol BE split nobody documented
CanalBaby spends €5,600 per month on bol Sponsored Products across NL and BE. The old agency split campaigns by market, but the naming was inconsistent. BE campaigns look underfunded: €38 per day, 5.8 ROAS, and several products with high click-through rates. A new operator could easily decide to double BE budget.
The revocation room prevents that mistake.
FiveX shows that the leading baby monitor SKU has 34 days of NL stock but only 11 days available for BE fulfilment. The SKU’s loaded margin is €18.70 per unit in NL and €14.10 in BE because shipping and return handling are higher. A BE budget increase from €38 to €76 per day would likely sell out the Belgian allocation before replenishment arrives, while the same budget on NL harvest terms still has capacity.
The exit package marks the BE scale plan as hold, not because the old agency was right forever, but because the stock veto is still active. The previous agency’s access is removed from budget editing, the campaign split rationale is stored, and the new operator gets a clear rule: reopen BE scale only when BE stock cover reaches 21 days or when margin improves above €16 per unit.
This is exactly where FiveX’s managed service is strongest. bol performance is not reviewed in isolation. Advertising reports, profitability and inventory are pulled into one decision, so a high ROAS campaign does not automatically win budget it cannot fulfil.
Named example 3: VoltEdge and the MediaMarkt package that needed a stop sign
VoltEdge sells accessories across Amazon, bol and MediaMarkt and spends €7,400 per month on marketplace ads. The exiting agency had been negotiating a €1,800 MediaMarkt retail media placement for a USB-C hub bundle. The new agency sees the plan and likes the reach. Finance sees the invoice draft and asks why it has not been approved.
The answer is in the revocation room. The bundle sells for €49.99. After product cost, retailer fees, expected returns and handling, projected contribution margin is €11.80 per unit. The retail media package needs about 153 incremental unit sales just to cover the €1,800 spend before any profit appears. Last month the same SKU sold 220 units across all marketplaces combined, but only 46 came from MediaMarkt.
The old agency had paused approval because Amazon competitor pressure was rising and bol margin was stronger. Unfortunately, that note lived in an email thread. Without the exit room, the new operator might approve the package just to show momentum.
The decision: revoke package-approval authority, mark the MediaMarkt plan as delete later until a fresh forecast exists, and redirect €600 into Amazon brand defence while holding €1,200 unspent. FiveX campaign logs then give the new operator a clean audit trail: the budget did not disappear, it was protected until the incremental unit math made sense.
The 14-day agency-exit operating plan
A practical revocation room can run on a two-week clock.
Day 0: confirm account ownership, contract end time, current users, API connections, automation owners and retailer commitments. Remove spend authority at the agreed time.
Days 1-2: export campaign settings, search-term reports, targeting lists, negative keyword lists, placement settings, budget history, automation rules, reporting dashboards and retail media proposals. Tag every active rule with owner, action, threshold and expiry.
Days 3-5: build the decision-memory ledger. For each meaningful campaign, record role, SKU group, margin permission, stock veto, target ACOS or ROAS, bid ceiling, budget cap and last material reason for change.
Days 6-10: run the first FiveX profit board. Compare Amazon, bol and MediaMarkt campaigns by contribution margin, stock cover, TACoS, ACOS, search evidence and marketplace role. Label every proposed change as keep, question, delete later, reduce, reopen or escalate.
Days 11-14: release limited optimisation rights to the new operator. Start with bid and negative changes inside agreed bands. Keep major budget moves, automation reactivation and MediaMarkt package approvals behind commercial approval until the first weekly report is reviewed.
What not to do during an agency exit
Do not let the old agency delete campaigns “to clean things up”. Archive is not the same as memory. Do not give the new operator full budget freedom on day one just because the previous agency underperformed. Do not treat campaign names as truth; verify SKU economics and stock cover. Do not assume Amazon logic transfers to bol or MediaMarkt. And please, do not judge the whole inherited account by last-30-day ACOS if the last 30 days included stockouts, coupons, fulfilment delays or a pricing change.
The better move is boring and profitable: preserve memory, remove spend authority, freeze orphaned automation, run the profit board, then reopen optimisation in controlled bands.
How FiveX helps during the exit
FiveX is built for exactly this kind of operating moment. The platform connects marketplace ads, revenue, SKU-level profitability, inventory insights and campaign logs, so an agency transition does not depend on memory living in someone’s inbox. The Advertising Service team can take over Amazon, bol and MediaMarkt accounts from roughly €5K monthly spend with a clear revocation room: access review, decision-memory export, automation freeze, profit board and controlled restart.
That is the trade-off I would choose every time. Slower for the first few days. Much safer for the next quarter.
A marketplace ad agency exit is not finished when the previous agency can no longer log in. It is finished when the new operator can explain which old decisions still protect profit, which ones have expired, and which ones are allowed to move money again.