Dolphin for Agencies: Client Accounts, Profile Handover, and What Happens When a Buyer Leaves

Every agency that buys media at scale ends up running the same unglamorous process twice a month: an account changes hands. A buyer resigns. A client is reassigned. A new starter needs access to eleven ad accounts on their second day and to none of them on their first. Dolphin for agencies is usually bought to make that afternoon survivable.

This article is about the whole life cycle, not the sales pitch: who opens a client ad account, who is allowed to touch it, what happens the day the buyer leaves, and what the client walks away with if the relationship ends. I work on Wevion, which sits on the API layer, so I will be explicit about where our part starts — but the first two thirds of this piece are about Dolphin and about agency process, and they would still be worth reading with our name removed.

For the product itself — what lives in the cloud, what stays local, how the plans are tiered — start with our Dolphin Cloud review.

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The five moments where a client account actually changes hands

Agencies tend to write onboarding documentation for the first of these and improvise the other four.

1. Account creation. Someone opens or is granted the ad account. This is the moment that decides everything downstream, and it is usually decided in a hurry.
2. Buyer assignment. A person is given the ability to spend the client's money.
3. Reassignment. The account moves to a different buyer, usually mid-flight, usually with campaigns live.
4. Offboarding. A buyer leaves. Access has to be removed everywhere, at once, including places nobody wrote down.
5. Client exit. The relationship ends. What the client takes with them was decided at step 1, not at step 5.

Dolphin has a clean answer for steps 2, 3 and 4 at the browser level. It has no opinion on steps 1 and 5, and neither does any other anti-detect browser — those are ownership questions.

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What Dolphin actually solves here, and it solves it well

Profiles instead of passwords

The failure mode Dolphin removes is specific and everybody in this industry has lived it: the shared login. One set of credentials, one authenticator app on one person's phone, and a spreadsheet that outlives three employees. When the buyer leaves, you do not know what they still have access to, because the credential and the person were never the same object.

A profile changes the unit. Access is granted to a profile rather than to a password, and it is granted per person. Revoking it is one action instead of a password rotation that half the team then has to be told about.

Cloud profiles make handover a grant, not a migration

On the desktop tier a profile is a folder on a machine. If that machine is a laptop and the laptop leaves with the buyer, handover is a conversation. Cloud profiles change that: the state lives on the provider's servers, so the second buyer is granted access rather than sent a file. For an agency, that is the difference between an offboarding checklist and an offboarding negotiation.

Isolation between clients

The reason agencies reach for this category in the first place is usually not what outsiders assume. It is rarely about hiding anything. It is that client A's session, cookies and logged-in state should not sit in the same browser as client B's, because one careless tab in the wrong profile is how a campaign gets published to the wrong account. Isolation is a hygiene control, and Dolphin gives it to you by default.

The honest limit of the layer, stated by the layer itself

A profile is an identity control. It answers who is in the room. It does not answer what they did once they were in it, and it was never advertised as doing so. Everything below is about that second question — it is not a criticism of Dolphin, it is a different job.

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The half a browser was never built to answer

Here is the moment that separates agencies with process from agencies with vibes.

A client emails in November: "Why did spend on the retargeting campaign jump 40% on 14 October?"

Your buyer left in September. The profile has been handed to someone else. The browser will tell you that a session existed. The ad platform will tell you that a change was made from an account you share with four other people. Neither will tell you which human made it, and neither will produce something you can attach to an email.

The answer to that question has a shape, and it is always the same shape:

In Wevion that is a table. audit_log stores user, action, resource type, resource id, IP address, user agent and timestamp, and the audit view exports to CSV — so the answer to "who paused this campaign on the 14th" is a filtered list you send to the client, not a reconstruction. You can also just ask the assistant for it in plain language: it reads the same table through a dedicated tool rather than guessing, and the CSV is the same CSV.

That is the sentence worth keeping: the profile gets your buyer into the account; the record is what you show the client afterwards.

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Permissions: the four levels, and why agencies need more than two

Most tools in this space give you two tiers — admin and everyone else — and agencies immediately discover that this is one tier too few. The person who reads a report is not the person who edits a budget, and the freelancer on one client is not the account director across nine.

Wevion's access model has four levels, and they nest:

• Organization — the agency itself.
• Team — usually the client, or the pod that serves them.
• Workspace — the working surface where campaigns, rules and reports live.
• Access groups — cross-cutting sets of people, so "the paid social pod" can be granted to five workspaces at once instead of being re-invited five times.

Two numbers, stated precisely because vagueness here is what causes the awkward call: the ceilings enforced in code are 100 workspaces, 50 teams and 200 memberships, and those are flat abuse ceilings — they are the same on every plan. The commercial seat cap is a different check entirely and it does vary by plan. So the number to read on the pricing page before you commit is seats, not workspaces. We would rather you find that out here than in month two.

Alongside it: two-factor authentication, a mandatory security setup step, and API keys scoped by domain with per-key rate limits — with one qualification said out loud, because it is the kind of thing that ruins a first week: API access is not available on the Free plan.

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Offboarding, as an actual checklist

The reason offboarding goes wrong is that access lives in more places than the person doing the offboarding remembers. Here is the list an agency running Dolphin plus an API layer should work through, in order:

1. Revoke the profile access in Dolphin. Removes the browser-level route into the account.
2. Remove the person from the team, not just from one workspace. Workspace-level removal leaves a membership behind, and a membership is a route back in.
3. Rotate any API key that person created. Keys outlive people. Scoped keys with per-key rate limits are still keys.
4. Check the ad platform's own user list. If the buyer was granted access natively in Business Manager as well, revoking your side changes nothing on Meta's side. This is the step that is skipped roughly always.
5. Pull the audit export for their last 30 days before you remove them, and keep it. The moment you need it is the moment you no longer have the person to ask.
6. Re-point the rules they owned. A rule that keeps running on a schedule after its author has left is not a security problem, but it is the origin of at least one story per agency.

Step 5 is the one that pays for itself. It costs a CSV export and it is the only artefact in the whole process that survives a change of staff on both sides.

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What the agency's other question is: six panels, one client report

The second thing agencies ask for after access is arithmetic, and this is where the API layer earns its keep rather than duplicating Dolphin.

Precise numbers, because rounding them up is how a demo goes badly:

• You connect, launch, sync and measure on six platforms: Meta, Google, TikTok, Taboola, Snapchat and Outbrain.
• Budget rules run on five. Outbrain has no budget branch in the rules engine — on Outbrain you change budget by hand or through the assistant.
• Rules that compare one platform against another run on four: Meta, Google, TikTok, Taboola.
• Pausing and activating at ad set and ad level works on three: Meta, TikTok, Snapchat. At campaign level, all six.
• Launch rollback and relaunch are Meta only.
• Instant duplication is Meta; on the other five you get a draft to review.

We say this before the demo rather than after because agencies are the buyer that checks. And it is still a stronger sentence than a round "six everywhere", because the specific number is the one you can act on when you plan a client's quarter.

On top of that sits the part that clients actually ask about: contribution margin next to spend, down to the individual ad. Revenue, refunds, cost of goods, shipping and processing fees resolve per entity, and the entity level goes to ad — so "which ad made money" is a query, not an inference. The commerce sources are Shopify and WooCommerce, and the tracker adapters cover the self-hosted ones no BI tool will ever integrate: Keitaro, Binom, ClickFlare, RedTrack, Voluum, BeMob, Everflow, ExoClick, TrafficManager and the search feed adapter. Ten of them, and they connect — they are not competitors of ours.

One detail from inside that pipeline, because it is the kind of thing that separates people who have done this from people who have specified it: when a currency conversion has no rate available for that day, the row is refused rather than saved. A fallback rate of 1 on a weak-currency account would understate spend by two or three orders of magnitude and produce a beautifully confident wrong margin. A gap in a chart is recoverable. A wrong number that nobody questions is not.

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The concessions, stated before you find them

CAMPO rule in this house: conceding first costs you a point, being caught costs you three. So:

• Client reporting is branding, not a portal. Five fields — agency name, logo, primary colour, secondary colour, report footer — applied to reports you generate. No client-facing portal, no custom domain, no per-client billing on top. Tools that sell a full branded portal exist and this is not one of them.
• Recurring scheduled sends are switched off in production. A report goes out when a human generates it. Do not plan a client cadence around automated delivery today.
• Creative uniqueization at launch does not exist here. If your workflow is thirty variants of one creative pushed at volume, that is a browser-layer job and Dolphin does it. What we handle is the problem after: which of the thirty is decaying, measured on all six platforms, with the baseline taken from that ad's own first days rather than from an account average.
• Element-level creative tagging — hook, frame, call to action, scored separately — is not something we do. Specialist creative-analytics tools do.
• Rollback exists on Meta and nowhere else, as above.
• Identity management is not on our roadmap and that is deliberate. It is Dolphin's craft. We are not going to build a worse version of it to win a checkbox.

Two modules that agencies ask about are real but not generally switched on: Traffic Filter — click and lead tracking, landing pages, offers, blacklists, postbacks — and Social Media Management, covering Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube with a unified inbox for comments and private messages. Both are in early access: they are switched on per account, on request. They are not part of what you buy on a plan today, and you should treat them as a conversation rather than a feature list. Social Media Management has no LinkedIn channel, and we would rather say so now.

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How the two layers actually sit together in an agency

The workflow that agencies converge on, once they stop trying to make one tool do both jobs:

1. The buyer opens the client's profile in Dolphin and gets into Business Manager. Identity, isolation, handover: solved, at the browser layer.
2. The client's ad accounts are connected once to the API layer over OAuth. No cookies, no browser puppets, no scraping — a registered app on the official Marketing API.
3. From that point, the repetitive work — launching across accounts, rules on a 15-minute cadence, budget pools that redistribute a single daily budget across campaigns on multiple platforms every eight hours with a simulation run first, margin, creative fatigue, the client report — happens server-side.
4. Nobody migrates anything. Dolphin stays exactly where it is, doing the job it is good at.

That is the whole argument, and its most useful property is that it does not ask an agency to rip anything out. The most expensive word in agency software is "migration", and this workflow does not contain it.

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The three questions to ask before you sign either tool

1. "Show me the answer to a client dispute." Ask the vendor to produce, on screen, who changed a budget on a specific date. If the answer is a demo of a dashboard rather than a filtered list with a user and an IP address, you have a reporting tool, not a record.
2. "What is the seat count on the plan I am actually going to buy?" In this category seats are where the price moves, and the ladder is usually steeper than the headline suggests. Ours included — check it.
3. "What happens when a buyer leaves?" Walk the six steps above with the vendor in the room. The number of tools whose answer stops at step 1 is the useful finding.

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Where this leaves you

Dolphin answers who gets into the account. It does that at the browser level, it does it well, and the cloud tier turns handover from a migration into a grant. That is a real problem solved.

The other half of the agency question — what happened inside the account, who did it, and can I show the client — is a record, on the API layer, next to the campaign. It is a different layer of the same stack, which is why plenty of agencies end up running both.

If you want the ownership and permissions side of this in more depth, we wrote it up separately in seven agency ad account permission mistakes. If you are running an e-commerce book rather than a services one, the margin question is sharper and we cover it in Dolphin for dropshippers. And if you want the two products side by side rather than layered, that is Dolphin Cloud vs Wevion.