Google Ads change history: who changed what, and how to restore it

What it does

Unexplained changes are normal in shared accounts. The client's in-house marketer pauses a campaign, a freelancer edits bids in Google Ads Editor, an automated rule raises a budget every Friday, a script disables ads with broken links, an auto-applied recommendation adds keywords. When performance moves, the first question is not what Google did, but what changed in the account and who did it. Google Ads keeps a record of these changes, and reading it well saves hours of guessing and awkward conversations.

Every change in Google Ads has a time, the user account that made it, the tool it came from and the object it touched: campaign, budget, ad group, ad, keyword or another setting. The tool matters as much as the person. A change from the web interface was made by hand, one from Google Ads Editor usually in bulk, one from scripts or automated rules on a schedule that someone set up long ago, and one through the API by a connected application. Auto-applied recommendations are another source. When the user is unfamiliar, the tool often tells you where to look.

Read every change as before → after, not just as an event. A budget changed from 50 to 150 tells a different story than one changed from 150 to 50, and a status switch from enabled to paused matters only if nobody turned it back. Narrow down to the object that misbehaved and the days before the shift in results, then look a little further back: delays between a change and its effect are common, especially for bid strategies and budgets. Google's web interface keeps a longer history than the change events available through the API, which cover the last 30 days according to Google's documentation, so look for older events in the web interface.

Restoring is where mistakes multiply. Before you revert, find out whether the change was intentional: the client may have paused a campaign on purpose, and a raised budget may be part of a plan nobody told you about. Ask first, then restore exactly the old value rather than an approximate one, and write down why. Google's web interface lets you undo some changes straight from the history, but in a team it is safer to treat a restore like any other change: proposed, reviewed and approved, with a record of who decided.

AdAce Ads shows all this in “Campaigns” → “Changes outside the service”. For Google it lists the change history with who made each change, when, with which tool, web interface, Editor, rules, scripts or API, and the values before → after; for Meta it shows the account's activity history. Changes made through AdAce Ads itself and Meta system events are hidden by default, so you see what happened outside your controlled process. For campaign, ad group and ad status and for Google campaign budget there is “Restore as it was”: it creates a normal proposal that an approver confirms with a password and second factor, and the executor reads the current state before writing.

Why it helps

• See who changed what, when and with which tool.
• Read every change as before → after.
• Changes made outside the service are separated from your own.
• Restore a status or budget through an approved proposal.

How to set it up

1. Open “Campaigns” → “Changes outside the service” and choose the client.
2. Find the campaign that changed and look at the days before the shift in results.
3. Read the tool, the user and before → after for each change.
4. Ask the person or team behind the change whether it was intentional.
5. If it was a mistake, press “Restore as it was” for the status or budget.
6. Approve the proposal with password and second factor and check the result.

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