AdAce AdsMeta ads activity history: who paused your ads and how to undo it
When results drop overnight, the first question is whether someone changed the account. This guide is for advertisers and agencies who need to read Meta's activity history quickly, tell people from systems, and put things back safely.
What it does
Meta Ads Manager keeps an activity history for every ad account. You can open it for the whole account or for a selected campaign, ad set or ad, filter it by date range and by who made the change, and see each entry with the item changed, the type of activity and, for many edits, the old and the new value. The trouble is volume: a busy account produces dozens of entries a day, and most of them are not decisions made by a person. Before you blame a colleague or a client for a paused campaign, sort the history into three kinds of entries.
Manual changes are made by a person in Ads Manager or the mobile app: status switched off, budget edited, audience narrowed, a creative replaced. They carry the person's name, and they are usually what you are looking for. System events come from Meta itself: ad review results, an ad set starting or ending delivery on schedule and similar automatic updates. They explain what happened, but nobody decided them. Changes via apps are made through the Marketing API by a connected tool, an automated rule or a partner platform, and the author shows as the app rather than a person. Knowing the kind of entry tells you whether to talk to a teammate, check a tool's settings or simply wait for review.
A practical routine: start from the moment the metric changed and look back a day or two. Hide system events first, then read the manual and app changes on the affected campaign and on its ad sets and ads, because a pause at a lower level stops delivery just as effectively. Write down the exact previous value before you touch anything. If an ad set was off for a long time, read Meta's help on the learning phase before turning it back on. And if the change came from an app, fix the rule or the integration first, otherwise it will quietly undo your fix again.
In AdAce Ads the screen “Campaigns” → “Changes outside the service” shows Meta activity history next to Google Ads change history for each client. Changes made through AdAce Ads itself and Meta system events are hidden by default, so what remains are edits made elsewhere, by people or by other apps. For a campaign, ad set or ad status you can press “Restore as it was”. It writes nothing immediately: it creates a normal proposal, which an owner or admin approves with a password and a second factor, and which then runs with the usual read-before-write check.
Why it helps
- See who paused or edited an ad without scrolling through Meta's full log.
- Manual edits are separated from ad review and other system events.
- Changes made by other apps are visible, so conflicting tools are easy to spot.
- Restoring a status goes through the same approval as any other change.
How to set it up
- Open “Campaigns” → “Changes outside the service” and choose the client.
- Pick the Meta ad account and the period when results changed.
- Read the remaining entries: who made the change, when and on which object.
- Show system events only when you need to check ad review or the start of delivery.
- Press “Restore as it was” next to a status change to create a proposal.
- Approve the proposal with your password and second factor.
Good to know
- “Restore as it was” covers campaign, ad set and ad status; to bring back a Meta budget, create a regular budget proposal instead.
- The service shows what Meta returns in the account's activity history; open a specific entry in Ads Manager when you need its full detail.
- If the account no longer matches the proposal when it runs, the change is refused instead of overwriting someone's newer edit.
Try it on your own accounts
Create a workspace, connect Google or Meta in a couple of clicks and see your accounts clearly. Changes follow your approvals or the policy you configure.
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