Change history allows you to review changes made to proposals, proposal line items, orders, line items, creatives, custom fields, key-values, Inventory rules, audience segments, users, and roles.
Reviewing changes can be useful for troubleshooting, particularly for unexpected delivery patterns. For most items, the change history displays what attribute changed, the former and new values (for example, from "Paused" to "Ready"), the user who made the change, and the date and time the change was made.
In some cases, Ad Manager itself makes changes. These changes often result from new features or product changes. Changes initiated by Ad Manager keep your system healthy and ensure that your campaigns run smoothly. Learn more about Ad Manager releases.
View the history of an item in context
Click History in the upper-right corner of an item's settings page to see the change history.
View the history of items from the Admin section
- Sign in to Google Ad Manager.
- Click Admin
Change history. For Inventory rules, you can also click the History icon
on the detail page for a specific rule.
- Define criteria for which to search all histories in your network.
- Choose the type of item you're seeking. For example, if you want to see the history of an order, choose "Order" from the selection menu.
Changes to audience segments do not appear in this menu or the Admin change history.
- Specify a date range for which you want to see changes. Dates should be entered in "M/D/YY" format. For example, to see all changes made in June 2016, specify "6/1/16" and "6/30/16" for the date range.
- Optionally, specify a user from your network to see only changes initiated by that user. To see changes for any user, leave this field blank.
- Choose the type of item you're seeking. For example, if you want to see the history of an order, choose "Order" from the selection menu.
- Click Search.
At the top of the change history table, you can decide what to show in the table.
- Choose Everything to display all attributes for each item regardless of whether any change was made. This can be useful to see the context surrounding a specific change to an item.
- Choose Changes only to only display attributes that were changed from one value to another.
View archived changes
Changes older than 2016 or 2017 (depending on the network) or not otherwise visible in change history are held in the archives. Archived changes are available in downloaded monthly files that contain archived changes made to objects during that month, according to the Ad Manager network's time zone setting. Downloaded files are in gzip (.GZ) format.
- Open the change history for an item, or open "Change history" in the Admin or Inventory rules section.
Look here first for your change. Only download files from the archive if you cannot find your change in change history.
- Click the change history archive link.
- Click the link corresponding to the month in which your archived change occurred to download a file containing the archived change history.
How to read the downloaded archive file
After un-zipping the downloaded file, use a text editor to read the file contents. Every change recorded in an archive file contains the following information:
- Date and time of the change, recorded in the network time zone.
- Name and email address of the user who made the change.
- Object type, such as
LINE_ITEMorCREATIVE_TEMPLATE. - Details about the changes made.
Example
2016-7-28 23:45:05 America/New_York
By: Jane Doe (johndoe@mycompany.com)
LINE_ITEM: 123456789 (My line item name)
StartTime changed from 9/2/16, 12:00 AM to 9/12/16, 12:00 AM
Quantity changed from 0 to 7000
____________________________________________________________
2016-7-28 20:10:17 America/New_York
By: Sam Sample (samsample@mycompany.com)
CREATIVE: 987654321 (My creative name)
Destination Url is http://www.myadvertiser.com/
____________________________________________________________
