Agency Ad Accounts vs. Farmed Accounts: What to Choose and How They Differ

JUNE 5, 2025 • AFFILIATE MARKETING • EXPERT OPINION

ScroogeFrog

ScroogeFrog offers agency ad management across global platforms, AI-powered fraud prevention, and access to premium publishers.

Choosing the right type of ad accounts is a critical step toward achieving performance and results at scale in affiliate marketing and e-commerce. Whether you're launching a white-hat campaign or testing gray- or black-hat creative materials, the success of your efforts often depends on using the right accounts for the work. Both farmed accounts and agency accounts offer unique advantages, but come with different risks, costs, and use cases. Let’s break down the core differences to help you make the right decision for your next campaign.

Why Different Types of Ad Accounts Matter

Different platforms such as Meta, Google, TikTok, etc. enforce unique policies, and depending on your market, niche, creatives, and spend level, the accounts you use may either scale your campaign or get banned on the first day. Choosing ad accounts correctly helps reduce bans, increase ROI, and optimize your ad infrastructure for different traffic strategies. The basic rule is to prefer farmed accounts for high-risk testing and gray/black hat niches and agency accounts for long-term, stable scaling with larger budgets.

What Are Farmed Accounts

Farmed ad accounts are accounts that are manually or semi-automatically created to appear legitimate. These accounts are typically aged and prepared beforehand to mimic real users with browser activity, social interactions, and time-based behavior.

Farmed accounts are usually created following this algorithm:

Log in using an anti-detect browser.
Prepare the account with realistic activity: likes, joins, scrolls.
Pair the account with GEO-targeted proxies and cookies.

After that these accounts are often sold in batches or managed with automation.

Pros of farmed accounts:

Low cost. They are great for testing creatives or launching volume campaigns.
Flexibility. These accounts can be tailored to specific regions, niches, and affiliate marketing tactics.

Cons of farmed accounts:

High ban risk. Due to the lower trust level farmed accounts are more likely to be blocked, especially without proper cloaking or preparation.
Time-consuming preparation. Farmed accounts require manual setup, maintenance, and high attention to details.

What Are Agency Accounts

Agency accounts are provided by official partners of advertising platforms like Facebook or Google. These are real business-level accounts with high trust scores, direct platform relations, and advanced permissions. Let’s dive deeper into the process of their creation.

To create these accounts the agency needs to:

Sign a partnership agreement. To become an official platform partner, e.g., Facebook Marketing Partner or Google Partners, an agency must have a consistent ad spend, a team of account managers, proven case studies, and legal compliance. As a result, the agency is authorized to open ad accounts for its clients, taking on financial and partial moderation responsibility.
Manage accounts via agency billing. Ad payments go through a central agency billing account, not directly from the advertiser. The account is labeled as belonging to the agency (visible in Business Manager or Google Ads interface).

To work with agency accounts a media buyer should:

Connect with the agency. After a media buyer has submitted a request, the agency reviews their experience and offers. Then passing media buyers are added to the agency structure, and it creates an ad account for them.
Prepare offers and landing pages.The agency will check whether there is any prohibited content and pre-approve it.
Get access to the account. Usually it happens via BM or in an anti-detect browser. A media buyer can run the ads independently or with support from the agency.
Fund the account. A media buyer also pays a commission to the agency based on their ad spend.

Pros of agency accounts:

High trust. Agency accounts are rarely banned for billing or ad content violations.
No spend caps. This means agency accounts could be used for big-budget campaigns.
Support. Many agency accounts come with dedicated managers or tech support.

Cons of agency accounts:

Cost. Agency accounts often come with commissions on spent funds or setup fees.
Dependency on the provider. If the partner cuts a media buyer off, they may lose access to their accounts.
Limited flexibility. Since strict compliance to the platform rules is required, agency accounts are not suitable for gray- and black-hat strategies.

Farmed Accounts vs. Agency Accounts: What Works Better?

Let’s analyse a real-world example offered by ScroogeFrog. The team managed 20 agency ad accounts to launch and scale a gray-hat nutrition campaign. A core element of their strategy involved employing a simple landing page that served as a white page. Their ad creatives, though straightforward, proved highly effective, skillfully balancing traditional advertising with gray-hat methodologies. These creatives primarily adopted three key styles: a "news broadcast" format, "telemarket" style presentations, and direct product descriptions.

To sustain and scale their spending levels, the team implemented a straightforward duplication strategy. This involved replicating successful campaigns, a method that allowed for steady growth without over-complicating the existing account structures. The robustness of their ad accounts was paramount, ensuring consistent performance even as ad volumes increased. The results speak for themselves:

Total Spend: $20,000.
Top 3 Accounts: $5,400 / $3,000 / $2,800.
Accounts Spending Under $100: Only 6.
Zero Spend Accounts: None.

This campaign maintained momentum over the following months, proving that with the right setup and agency-level stability, scaling in competitive markets is definitely achievable.

How to Keep Your Accounts Alive

If you’re running gray- or black-hat campaigns, survival of your accounts depends on technical hygiene:

Use anti-detect browsers. Use tools like Octo Browser to spoof your digital fingerprints, so that each account looks like another unique user.
Apply proper cloaking. Ensure your landing pages meet ad policy requirements.
Properly prepare your accounts. Run white-hat ads for a few days before launching more aggressive creatives.
Use high-quality proxies. Proxies need to be related to your target GEO, especially in the case of farmed accounts. For most media buying tasks, HTTPS proxies are generally the solid option due to their compatibility with ad platforms, ease of integration with browser tools, and encryption. However, if you need more versatility for other types of traffic or have specific automation needs, SOCKS5 proxies might also be worth considering. You can learn more about the difference between these proxy types here.
Respect platform limits. Don’t overspend too early. Gradual scaling helps reduce the chance of getting your accounts suspended.

Final Checklist

Use farmed accounts if:

You're testing new offers, landing pages, aggressive creatives, and cloaking strategies.
Your budget is limited.
You’re working in niches with high ban rates such as nutrition, gambling, sweepstakes, dating, or crypto.

Use agency accounts if:

You already have proven strategies and set-ups.
You work in such niches as e-commerce, lead generation, finance, or education.
Your spend is over $300 per day.
You need long-term stability and minimal bans.

Сonclusion

To summarize, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution in media buying. Farmed accounts offer cheap, flexible entry points, but come with high volatility risks. Agency accounts deliver trust and scale, but at a cost. The key is to match your strategy to your tools.

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