Change history provides a log of changes to items (also referred to as entities) such as campaigns, keywords, and ads. The report shows whether changes were made by an account sync, a user, or a system, such as advertiser management or bid optimization. The report also includes links to the account, campaign, and ad group where the change occurred, enabling you to view performance metrics at the selected scope.
Use the change history to:
- Investigate which actions improved or degraded a campaign’s performance.
- See changes which may show how a bid strategy is managing its portfolio.
- Verify that changes were made.
What's new in change history
If you used change history in the past, it now includes more features that enable you to see, filter, and drill into the data that you want:
- Access change history from the page menu to see changes at the selected scope and lower.
Examplewhile viewing campaign performance metrics, you notice that the number of clicks dropped from 1000 to 500. To try to figure out what happened, click Change history in the left navigation panel. The report lists all changes to and within the campaign. That is, you can see changes made in the campaign, and its ad groups, keywords, ads, and bid strategy, if applied.
- Filter the change history report. To see only changes made to campaigns, without changes made to the campaign's entities, filter the report to the campaign entity.
- Scope the report before or while viewing change history. To scope the report before viewing change history, while viewing performance metrics, click Change history. To scope the report while viewing change history, use the navigation bar near the top of the new Search Ads 360 to navigate to a different scope.
- Switch to the performance metric report directly from change history. In the Change history report, click the account, campaign, or ad group to switch to view for the entity to view the performance chart with performance information.
Types of changes in account change history
- Account budget: Changes to your account’s or campaign budget
- Account type: Changes related to client accounts
- Bid strategy: Change history shows changes for a particular bid strategy or strategies
- Change type: Filter by the type of change made
- Item changed: Filter by specific items changed
- Tool: Filter by the tool used to make changes
- User: Filter by the users who made changes
What's in the change history report
The change history report displays:
- Email address of the person who made a change.
- How the change was made.
- When the change was made.
- When the change was trafficked to the engine.
- Type of item or entity, such as a campaign or keyword that the change applies to. Also the name of the account, campaign, and ad group of the changed item.
- Change details. For example, you can see if a URL template was added to a campaign, a geo-target was removed from an ad group, a bulk edit increased bids by 10%, or a bid strategy set a mobile bid adjustment to -20%.
- Changes that occurred at the selected scope and lower.
- Changes from May 21, 2016 or later.
- Changes to inventory management templates.
Changes not tracked in the change history report
- Changes made by or to ad copy tests are not included in the report. For example, change history doesn't include the start date for an ad copy test, or an ad group's membership in a test.
- Changes made by or to attribution models. For example, change history doesn't track whether a different attribution model is applied to a column.
What you can do with the change history report
In addition to using the report to view changes, you can filter and scope the report to see the data you want, and download a non-editable version of the change history report in a file format such as (XLS, XLSX, or CSV).