Transferring accounts to a new owner

Reparenting is the act of transferring any number of Microsoft Advertising accounts to a new owner at any time through the Transfer accounts wizard.

In Microsoft Advertising, accounts are arranged in a hierarchy with a manager account containing one or more other accounts under it that serve ads. The Transfer accounts wizard makes it easy to move any of these accounts around with no data loss and no down time.

Most advertisers will only have one manager account containing one or two accounts. But larger companies and ad agencies can own several manager accounts, each with multiple ad-serving accounts. From time to time, an individual account needs to be transferred to a different manager account. Use Microsoft Advertising’s account transfer feature to move (or "reparent") an account to a new owner.

Is the feature right for you?

Although anyone can use this feature, account transfers are geared toward ad agencies and large businesses. Common use cases for this feature include:

Company re-org or acquisition. A client wants to leave their agency and move their account elsewhere.
Hierarchy adoption. An ad agency is taking over account management or wants to move accounts around.
Fixing bad or old setups that clutter a client view within a hierarchy.

What to expect

Once you submit the request, a simple account transfer can be processed within 20 minutes. However, some transfers will take up to 24 hours if you’re moving several accounts that contain lots of data (such as campaigns, ads, and keywords).

To expedite the process, you should have the following items on-hand before you get started:

The account numbers of the accounts you want to transfer
The manager account number that will receive transferred accounts
Whether to keep or remove linked accounts and direct managers as part of the transfer
Know who will pay for advertising charges
A payment method (including an insertion order for monthly invoice accounts)

To begin an account transfer

Go to Accounts Summary.
Select the Management tab.
Check the box for each account wish to transfer and select Transfer accounts from the Accounts Summary page. Follow the instructions through to completion.