How to Use Catchr When Your Agency Owns the Ad Accounts

The short answer: if an agency or freelancer holds your Meta Ads and Google Ads logins, Catchr lets the account owner connect them to your workspace through a one-time link without seeing anything else, and Starter at $24 a month on monthly billing covers three platforms and ten accounts (pricing page, checked on 26 October 2026). Send the link, open Catchr's Data Studio connector for each platform with the template switched on, add GA4, route failure alerts to Slack, and let Claude draft the monthly commentary through Catchr's MCP while a person checks every figure against the report.

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The awkward part of owning marketing without owning the ad accounts is that every number reaches you as a screenshot from the agency. Catchr turns that around: the data lands in your Data Studio, under your login, and the agency keeps its access. Plans and limits are in the Catchr glossary entry.

What to have ready:

1. The account count. For example, two Meta ad accounts, one Google Ads account and one GA4 property make 2 + 1 + 1 = 4 accounts on 3 platforms, inside Starter's 10 accounts and 3 platforms on the pricing page.
2. The person who owns each ad account. Name and email for each login, because the invite goes to them and expires after 7 days (invite article).
3. A Slack channel for broken connections. A failed source should reach you on the day it breaks, not on the day the report is due.

What you need

• A Google account. Catchr signs you up with Google, and the 14-day trial starts when you first sign in (trial article).
• The same Google account in Data Studio and Chrome; it is the first thing the Data Studio guide checks when setup throws a 403 error.
• Your own access to GA4, if the property sits with you rather than with the agency.

Step 1: Create the source and send the link

In app.catchr.io, open Source, then Add a source, search for Facebook Ads and click Connect. Give the source a clear name such as "Meta Ads, agency login", click Next, and at the connection step choose Send a custom link. Enter the agency contact's email and click Send link (invite article). They receive a Connect source button, go through Meta's own authorisation, and the source appears in your account. They never see your workspace. Repeat for Google Ads, where the accounts that count are individual ad accounts, not the manager account (account definition).

Step 2: Connect GA4 yourself

Add a source for Google Analytics 4 and connect it with your own login. GA4 counts its properties as accounts, so pick only the property the report needs (how Catchr works).

Step 3: Build the report from Catchr's Data Studio connectors

Data Studio is the new name of Looker Studio since April 2026 (Data Studio release notes), and Catchr's help pages still use the old one. Open Catchr's connector list, pick the Facebook Ads connector, click Authorize, select the ad account in the dropdown and click Connect. Leave Use report template for new reports ticked, and Data Studio creates a report from Catchr's default template that you can edit (Data Studio guide). Then add the Google Ads and GA4 connectors to the same report as extra data sources.

If an account is missing from the dropdown, check that the source shows it in app.catchr.io and that you are signed in to the same Google account everywhere (missing accounts article).

Step 4: Send failures to Slack

When a source fails to refresh, its accounts go dark and every report built on them errors. Catchr emails the account owner by default; in Settings, Notifications, click Connect Slack and pick the channel (alerts article). The fix is usually a reauthorisation: Source, Edit, Refresh my authorization. If the agency's login is the one that expired, send a fresh invite link.

Step 5: Draft the commentary with Claude through Catchr's MCP

On a paid Claude account, open Customize, Connectors, click the plus, choose Add custom connector, name it Catchr and enter https://api.catchr.io/mcp, as the Claude setup article shows; Catchr is also listed in Claude's connector directory (MCP page). Then use a prompt from Catchr's usage examples, narrowed to your accounts: "Using my connected Catchr data, write the monthly recap for last month across Meta Ads, Google Ads and GA4, compared with the month before, with a table per channel."

Claude drafts; a person signs off. Before the recap goes to the board, check every figure in it against the Data Studio report for the same dates, and check which conversion it used, because each platform counts its own.

What Catchr's help centre flags

• Platform quotas. "Quota exceed. Try again later." means the platform's API limit was reached, and usually means waiting an hour or a day; GA4, for one, allows 200,000 tokens per property per day (limitations article).
• Accounts that switch back on. Deactivating an account does nothing while a Data Studio data source still requests it; delete those data sources first (usage article).
• Expired invites. The link works once and lasts 7 days; after that, send a new one (invite article).

The month's total, checked against your own books

Meta and Google each report the conversions their own ads touched, so a report that adds the two can show more sales than the business made. The free check needs no tool: put the month's orders or qualified leads from your shop or CRM beside the summed platform conversions. If the platforms claim much more than you counted, show each platform on its own line and stop adding them up.

While the trial runs, watch the counter rather than the calendar. Every account a report touches during the 14 free days counts toward usage over the trailing 30 days (usage article), and the billing article has you pick a plan by that number. The dashboards built to test Catchr therefore set the tier you buy. Connect only the accounts the monthly report needs.

Later, if you want that gap between platform claims and your own orders tracked month after month, a causal attribution tool such as Causality Engine measures it; disclosure: I founded it.

FAQ

Does the agency see my other data when it connects a source?

No. The invite article states that the invited person connects the source only and gets no access to your Catchr workspace.

Can several people in my team edit the report?

Yes. Catchr includes unlimited users on every plan, and any Catchr user can build reports on an account linked to the workspace, even without access to the ad account itself (how Catchr works).

Does Catchr keep a copy of the ad data?

No, except for Amazon Ads. Connectors call the platform each time a report refreshes, per how Catchr works.