Change History

Change history is the account log that records every change, what was changed, by whom, and when, and it is your first stop when performance suddenly moves.

You open the account on Monday and something is off. Spend doubled over the weekend, or conversions fell off a cliff, and nobody warned you. Your instinct is to blame the market, a competitor, a bad news cycle, anything outside your control. Before you go there, open the change history. It is a plain, timestamped record of every edit made to the account, and next to each entry it names the change, the exact setting that moved, and the person or process that did it.

The move is simple. You find the date performance shifted, and you line the change history up against that date. Nine times out of ten there is an edit sitting right on the day things turned. A budget someone bumped, a bid strategy switched, a keyword paused, a location setting widened. It might have been you last Thursday, half-asleep. It might have been a teammate who did not mention it. Very often it is an auto-applied recommendation that Google turned on for you and never made a fuss about. The log does not care whose fault it is; it just tells you the truth.

One habit to build. Check the change history before you change anything else. If you start fixing the account based on a guess, you pile new edits on top of the old ones and muddy the very record that would have told you what happened. Read first, confirm the cause, then act. If you run with a team or leave recommendations on auto-apply, make it a weekly glance, not just an emergency tool.

When results move, do not blame the market until you have read the log.