Google Ads Change History

At some point in your career, you’re probably going to see a big change in 1-year PPC campaigns in Google Ads. Now, whether that changes for the good or for the bad, it’s always important to understand why the change occurred. And that is where the Change History tool can be very helpful. Within Google Ads, you can look within a certain date range to see what changes happen within your account. This can be either at the account level, the campaign level, or the ad group level. From there, you can look a variety of different types of changes to see what actions actually occur within that time frame. Even better, can even see who made those changes. Whether it was yourself to get a better understanding of why you made it, or if it was one of your teammates, you can have that discussion with them.

So, within this tool, we’re going to look at where the change history report exist. We’re going to see what types of changes you can review. And then we’ll go back into the Google Ads Made Interface and see what type of Change History columns you can add to your report.

As you can see, we are in the Google Ads interface and to find the Change History, it’s actually pretty easy. Just look in the left-hand navigation menu and towards the bottom, we see Change History. In this particular view, I have it blown up a little bit. So, my font size and my other screen dimensions is pushing it down. But either way it’s typically right under your settings. I had to zoom out a little bit just because I wanted to make sure that we can get as much information on the screen at the same time. I will be expanding some information just so we can see what some of the columns can do. But let’s go over what you can see in the view of your Change History.

Now the first thing that’s important to note is the date range. While it says custom, I essentially have last month’s date selected. So, within the blue box we can see that there were 1.79K changes made in this account and I am at the account level. I’ll quickly go over the 4 columns that we see even though most of the information is blurred out. So, the first column is the user and the date and time. So, I’m blurring out the user that made the change, the date that they made the change and the time that the change was made. And the time is going to be from whatever time zone you have set up within the account settings. You did this when you first set up your Google Ads account.

The next column is the change that was made. Looking at the first row, it says one group had their max CPC decreased and then we get the campaign where these changes made and the ad group where these changes made. If I click on the change drop down it’s showing me specifically how the max CPC decreased, what were the two amounts. So, those are all changes, but we can go over and select specific changes made. So, the first one is Account Changes you can see most of these changes are admin related. They don’t affect a particular campaign or Ad group. So, in the first row a specific site link feed was added. In the second row, the custom manager link changed. Like I said, admin changes that really cannot be undone.

Let’s get into some more specific examples. Ad Changes, in this case, there were some video ads created. You could click the drop down. It’s going to give you all the information. The name of the ad, the headline that we selected, the video that we’re using for the ad. Since these are responsive, the newer ad format for YouTube. It’s going to give me the longer headline, the description, the call to action, So, I know specifically what was created on what date.

Next, we can look at Bidding Changes. The examples that we saw up top were the ones that we saw last in the all-Changes section, because they were created on the last day of the month and that’s because we have it sorted reverse chronologically. By click on this just to see different information, we get another example of an ad group max CPC decrease, but we also get information about CPCs changing for dynamic Ad targets and just overall bid adjustments. So, as I clicked on some of those bid changes, we get to see in one of these cases, a bid adjustment was completely removed. And then the one below it, there was a percentage bid adjustment for a mobile audience.

Saying that all the ways you can adjust your bidding, whether it’s manually adjusting your CPCs, increasing, or decreasing the percentages of your bids, setting new complete bids, and all the different ways and areas where you can make those bid adjustments. All that information will be recorded within this report.

Next one is pretty straightforward, your Budget Changes. Some of the examples up top are pretty straightforward. When a new campaign is created, so is a new budget and it’s giving us information than you think. We see my delivery method for my Ads. I’ve decided to show them evenly over time. It’s letting me know that I’ve selected the daily budget option and that the amount I want is $20 per day. More than just a dollar amount they toss there. Why it’s repeating? That I don’t know but in a different example, down below a little bit, this is just making simple change to a budget.

Increasing it from the original $20 I had to $100, and we could see in the user date and time column, I just did that two days later. And of course, the campaign is going to show us which campaign saw those changes, but since your budgets control at the campaign level there’s nothing to show us at the Ad Group column.

Next, you’ll see Access Changes. Was anyone granted access to the account to either view or manage the information. Then any relationships or partnerships end and people were removed from the account. You can see that information there.

Next is Conversion Changes. This particular account doesn’t have any within this time range, but you’ll get information on if new conversions were created or imported within the account. If you changed any of the settings for those conversions, and this could be very important. Maybe you changed the attribution window for that conversion action. So, instead of a 30-day click window, you changed it to 90, that will be recorded. If you change your attribution model completely, you went from last click to data driven. That will be recorded. It’s good to note then from the date of when those changes happen to your conversions, potentially maybe it change the way that conversions were reported within the channel.

Even simple changes like the conversion category will be recorded. Labeling your conversion, a purchase or a lead form submission. That type of information that you set up within the conversion settings, any little tweak you made to your conversions will be recorded here. I’m going to click over this right arrow to see that we have more options.

Keyword Changes. On September 1^st, 4 negative exact match keywords were added to this specific campaign. I know it’s blurred out and then you can click and see what those negative keywords were. Great example of this happening is also maybe some of those negative keywords might be blocking out search query that were converting well in the past. It’s good to go back in the history in a certain day range when you saw keyword performance change and say, oh, we really saw performance change once I added these negative keywords.

You might want to remove them from your negative keyword list and see if performance goes back to the way, it was. If I close this out and drop down on the other one, three broad match keywords were added. I’m not here to rip on broad match. I’ve seen it work very well in certain accounts, but it doesn’t work all the time. If you test it out adding some broad match keywords within the account, all of a sudden, you’re wondering why search query relevance may not be as well as it used to be or spend really went out and your cost per conversions really went out. You can potentially go back find a date when these broad keywords were added and either pause or remove them from the account.

But as you can see, we get it from the target keyword perspective as well as the negative, but then Google is going to tell you what the match type was for both the target and the negative keywords.

Audience Changes. If you’ve added or removed any audiences to your campaigns that will be reported here. If you’ve added any negative audiences to any of your campaigns or ad groups, that will also be reported here.

Next, you have Network Changes. In September, we’ve only created campaigns. I was just going to show me the networks I had selected. These campaigns are all video campaigns. So, there’s really not much to show except YouTube search network, but think about the other campaign types. For example, let’s think about the search network. Maybe you turned off the display network in your targeting. You had one campaign that was targeting both search and display. If you turned off display from the campaign and leave it just a search campaign, we’ll be able to see that here. Maybe you want to expand reach and add search partners back into your campaign targeting. If you change that within your campaign settings, that will also be reported here.

Status Changes, these are changes like pausing a component of the campaign, enabling a component of the campaign or removing or deleting a component. So, this could be anything from a campaign, Ad group, keyword, or Ad. You pause a bunch of Ads; we’ll see it here. You reenable an Ad group, we’ll see that in here. If you remove a campaign that has had zero impressions for the past year and it’s just filling up space, we’ll see that information here. So again, that’s pausing, enabling, or removing one of those components that pretty much make up your campaign structure within Google Ads.

Next, there’s Targeting Changes. I already scroll down a bit so we can see some different examples. You can see examples up here of specific data segments, age ranges, genders, language, location targeting, as well as some bit adjustments related to those. So, think about when you’re in Google Ads editor. And you click on the targeting section, pretty much anything that falls within that category will be shown here. We see optimization goal changes and there’s none here. I’ll be honest, I’ve never used that one. It’s really not important to me so I am going to skip it.

The next thing I want to talk about is potentially undoing some of the changes and I know we saw that when we looked at all changes. You may see under the user and the date and time a change is made a blue undo link. You can undo a good amount of changes if those changes occurred within the last 30 days. So, let’s open this row up again. The max CPC for this ad group decreased from $8 and 47 cents to $8. If I click undo, the max CPC for the ad group will go back up to $8 and 47 cents. If I actually do click on it, it’s going to give you a confirmation. ‘Do you actually want to undo the following changes?’ So, we’ll get the final confirmation. If I do click this undo, the ad group max CPC will go back to the original, but I need a lot of this.

Now, another cool feature about the Change History is going to be the filters. If you know specifically which campaign is seeing performance fluctuations or the Ad group. You can click on one of those options, search for the particular campaign or ad group name and filter just by those views, because it save you a lot of time instead of sorting through everything. That is because I am looking at it from the account level.

Now, I’m going to select a specific campaign. I chose one specific campaign. We see our date ranges the same, but all the changes went down to 93. I don’t have an arrow going over anymore, because these are the only options, we get at the campaign level. So yes, if you’re at the account level you could filter by campaign or you can jump within that particular campaign itself. Same thing at the Ad group level. Either way let’s stick with filters. If I want to, I could sort by change type. This can be helpful if you’re making a ton of changes in this particular campaign or in this particular view. But you only want to see certain sections of a change type. Because I don’t really need to filter by audience when I can just go over and click this box.

I’ll talk about more about the deep ones like bidding changes. We have 82 bidding changes within this particular month. So, maybe I only want to see when I increase bids. Click Apply and then it’ll filter by just those changes. I went from I believe 82 was the number down to 58. So again, it’ll save me a little bit more time. We see other options here, but I want to talk about my favorite which is User. There are 49 users in this particular account. So, whether they’re the account owner who’s maybe outsourced the work to an agency or your manager at the agency, you want to keep track of your team. You can select a particular user, click Apply and then it’ll show you just the changes for that user. I only selected one but you can’t select a variety of users if you want to see a particular team.

I always feel weird mentioning this. I do not want to encourage micromanaging or looking over someone’s shoulder and I also don’t want to encourage pointing fingers if performance changes for the worse. What I do encourage is having that open discussion with whoever made the change of why it was made. What was the thinking of the hypothesis at the time of why changes were made if it is for the worst? But I know from peer agency experience throughout my entire career I’ve definitely had those experiences where I’m wondering like, why did performance change. And I’ll go into the account look at the Change History and find out that the client was going in there and tweaking stuff without me even knowing and it really mess things up. So, sometimes yes it could be a good CYA.

Then the last thing I want to talk about is going to be Change History columns and that we can jump back into the main interface. Right now, I’m back to the main camp view, and to customize your columns we need to just head over to the column section. Here I’ll modify, and within this view Change History has their own options. I want to make sure they’re visible right away. So, I’m going to get rid of a bunch of these and then add in all of them. If you want to save it, go for it, but I’m only making this view for a video.

So, why would you want to look at Change History columns with your other stats? One example would be a quick level of attention. Maybe you don’t need to get this specific with all these other changes, maybe just want to look at all changes. If I see certain campaigns haven’t had any changes within a month maybe even longer, but they’re struggling from the conversion standpoint and they’re spending a lot of money. It’s an easy way to see this campaign needs attention. Whether I need to try to optimize it or just turn it off until I have time to optimize it. Sometimes this could be an easier view to look at the column and what changes were made during the state range instead of going into the actual Change History report.

If I make a specific Change History column view and save that view, I can look at one particular campaign. If I know that’s the campaign where performance has changed and then maybe see, okay, what changes were made during the state range that might have impacted that performance change. One thing I would say is don’t get too focused on the amount of changes. I’m totally on board with the idea of we don’t need to touch everything all the time. If you have a campaign that’s been running great, let it keep running unless you see some clear winds where you can even make it better. I’m also saying this because sometimes these stats can be duplicated.

For example, if I pause the keyword, that action pausing the keyword which show up in keyword changes as well as status changes. We did see earlier in this video that bid changes were also showing up in the targeting changes view. So, if you are making frequent changes, some of them are going to be duplicated and that’s going to make your all changes number look a lot bigger than what it actually is. I know I’ve said it already but I can’t stress it enough. The point of this report is not to give you the idea of making changes for the sake of just making changes.

To me, the main benefit of this report is to find out when there are major performance changes within an account to try to help dig what was done to maybe have caused those changes. If it’s recent enough, like we said within the past 30 days, we can just undo most of the changes, not all of them, most. But then, even if we can’t undo them, we at least potentially know what change to manually go back into your campaigns or Ad groups and make those changes and try to revert it back to the way it used to be. Not all ideas and test that we have are going to work, but having more information about why it did or did not work, is always going to be beneficial.

Change History is a pretty good, valuable, free tool within Google Ads that will hopefully get you out of some troubleshooting hot spots. If you have any questions on the tool or have unique ways you have used it to optimize your account, please share with the community in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez