See your account history

Your Google Ads account contains a history of changes that shows what you've done in the past. This change history can help you better understand what events may have led to changes in your campaigns' performance. You can see up to 2 years of changes.

This article explains how to find and use change history in your account. It also explains how to undo changes.

Instructions

See your change history

  1. In your Google Ads account, hover over the Campaigns icon Campaigns Icon, then click Change history in the side panel.
  2. Under the "Change overview" tab, you can find 4 different tabs.
    • By user: Shows the most recent change made to the account, and who made it.
    • By campaign: Shows changes made to a campaign, including the volume of changes in a given period, a summary of the most recent changes, and the ability to filter the table by date or user.
    • Performance: Shows an overview of your performance with insight annotations to help them improve.
  3. To see changes for a particular date range, select the dates in the upper right corner.
  4. To select the scope of the changes you want to see, use the Views bar on the top. (If you’re using a smaller screen, you may need to expand the panel by clicking the arrow icon Open navigation panel.)
    Note: If you prefer to use the navigation panel on the left, click Change view in the top left of your Google Ads account.
    • To see changes for all your campaigns, click All campaigns from the Views bar on the top.
    • To see changes for a particular campaign type, click that campaign type.
    • To see changes for a particular campaign, click the campaign’s name.
  5. To see details of a change, click the arrow icon next to the change.
  6. Below the “Change overview” tab, you find counts of different change type filters. Click on individual change types that filter the list below to show only changes from that type.
    • Change type filters: When you click on a filter, you can view a set of secondary filters. The selected filter slides to the left, and you can click on a secondary filter to change the type of filter that is applied. For example, if you click on the "Date" filter, you can view a set of secondary filters that allow you to filter by date range, day of the week, or month.
  7. To filter your change history, follow the instructions to filter your view of performance data.

The filter options are:

  • Campaign – campaigns that changed
  • Ad group – ad groups than changed
  • Change type – filter by the type of change made
  • User – filter by the user(s) who made changes
  • Tool – filter by the tool used to make changes
  • Item changed – filter by specific items changed
  • Campaign experiment – filter by campaign experiments changed
Note: You can view Change History data contextually without leaving the campaigns table. In the campaigns table, select the campaigns that you want to view (on the left next to their names), and then click "Change History" in the blue panel that appears above the table.

View performance statistics for only affected campaigns or ad groups

From change history, you can go to a filtered view of your performance statistics to see only the campaigns or ad groups that were affected by selected changes.

  1. In your Google Ads account, hover over the Campaigns icon Campaigns Icon, then click Change history in the side panel.
  2. To see changes for a particular date range, select the dates in the upper right corner.
  3. To select the scope of the changes you want to see, use the View bar on the top. (If you’re using a smaller screen, you may need to expand the panel by clicking the arrow icon Open navigation panel.)
    Note: If you prefer to use the navigation panel on the left, click Change view in the top left of your Google Ads account.
  4. Select the changes you’re interested in seeing by selecting the checkboxes next to each change.
  5. Click Go to to see a drop-down that displays the number of ad groups or campaigns that have changed.
  6. Click ad group or campaign to see a filtered list of all campaigns or ad groups that changed.

The types of changes you can see

You can see the following kinds of changes in your account change history:

  • Ad: Actions taken to create, edit, pause, resume, or remove an ad
  • Asset: Actions taken to asset changes
  • Audience: Changes to audience targeting
  • Budget: Changes to your campaign's budget and budget allocations
  • Bidding: Adjustments to your ad group, limit bid, strategy target bid, strategy type bid, and keyword bids
  • Conversions: Actions taken to create, edit, or remove conversion actions
  • Feed: Actions taken to create, remove, or update the feed
  • Language: Actions taken to target ads to specific languages
  • Location: Changes to advanced location targeting
  • Network: Changes to the ad network(s) your campaign is targeting
  • Other changes: Include changes to your account settings, such as your billing information, payment methods, and notifications.
  • Keyword: Actions taken to add, pause, resume, or remove keywords; adjustments to a keyword-level maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bid or landing page
  • Status: Actions taken to pause, resume, or remove a campaign, ad group, keyword, or ad
  • Targeting: Adjustments to language and location targeting

In addition to changes made directly in your Google Ads account, your change history will show changes made via automated rules, Google Ads API (AdWords API), and Google Ads Editor.

Your change history doesn't track password changes (for security reasons).

Undo changes

You can undo most types of changes, as long as they were made in the last 30 days. Undoing reverts the change to its previous state. If there are multiple changes listed in the same row, "Undo" will undo all of these changes together.

Changes eligible for undo have an option to undo in the “User / Date & Time” column. If a change can’t be undone, it will say “Changes can’t be undone” in the “User / Date & Time” column.

Here's how to undo changes in your account history:

  1. On your change history page, identify the row with the set of changes you want to undo.
  2. Click Undo in the “User / Date & Time” column.You’ll see a message confirming that you want to undo the changes.
  3. Click Undo.
  4. You’ll now see “Changes undone” in the “User / Date & Time” column.
In rare cases, you won't be able to undo changes even if you've clicked Undo. Google Ads will let you know if that happens. This could be because an associated item has been removed since the change was made, or someone else with access to your account has already undone the change since you last refreshed the page.

Add change history columns to your statistics tables

You can see a tally of the changes made to your account by adding change history columns to your “Campaigns” and “Ad groups” pages. To do this, follow the instructions to add or remove columns in your statistics table.

To find change history columns:

  1. In your Google Ads account, hover over the Campaigns icon Campaigns Icon.
  2. Click the Campaigns drop-down menu. Click Campaigns, Ad groups, or Ads.
  3. Click the Columns icon A picture of the Google Ads columns icon above the statistics table.
  4. Click Modify columns. You can find the “Change history” column by scrolling through the list of column types.
  • The total displayed in the "All changes" column is not the sum of the other change history columns in your table. It's the total number of changes you've made. For example, say you pause an ad. The "Ad changes" column and the "Status changes" column would each show 1 change, because pausing an ad is both a change to the ad and a change to the status. However, the "All changes" column would only show 1 change, not 2, because you only made 1 change.
  • Some changes, like changing the name of an ad group, are only displayed in the "All changes" column. This is because they don't fall into any of the other change categories. This is another reason why you should not consider the "All changes" column a sum of the other change history columns.
  • Changes made yesterday are displayed after 10 a.m. Pacific Time (PST) today. Changes made before May 19, 2014 are not shown.

 

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