Who Changed My Google Ads Account? How to Find Out (2026)
Who changed my Google Ads account? Where to find Change History, what it shows, its 2-year limit — and how to get notified of every future change.
Updated July 2026.
To find out who changed your Google Ads account, open Change History from the Campaigns menu (or go directly to ads.google.com/aw/changehistory) and use the “By user” tab. Google Ads logs every change with the user's email, a timestamp, and the old and new values, going back two years. Here is exactly how to read it — and how to make sure you're never reconstructing a mystery again.
How to see who made changes in Google Ads, step by step
Per Google's documentation, the current path is:
- In your Google Ads account, open the Campaigns menu and click Change history. (Change columns no longer appear on the Campaigns and Ad groups pages — the Change history page is where the data lives.)
- In the “Change overview” area you'll find three tabs: By user (most recent changes and who made them), By campaign (change volume and summaries per campaign), and Performance (performance overview with annotations).
- Set the date range in the upper right corner to bracket the moment performance moved.
- Use the “Views” bar to scope to all campaigns, one campaign, or a campaign type.
- Filter the table. The available filters are campaign, ad group, change type, user, tool, item changed, and campaign experiment. “User” answers who; “tool” tells you whether the change came through the UI, an automated rule, the API, or Google Ads Editor.
- Click the arrow next to any change to see its details — including old and new values.
- To connect changes to results, check the boxes next to suspect changes and click Go to to see performance for only the affected campaigns or ad groups.
What Google Ads change history shows
Change history covers the changes that matter operationally: budgets, bids and bid strategies, keywords, ads, assets, audiences, targeting, conversion actions, status changes (pause, resume, remove), and account settings like billing and notifications. Critically, it includes changes made through automated rules, the Google Ads API, and Google Ads Editor — not just clicks in the UI. So if an ill-considered automated rule or a third-party tool is rewriting your bids at 3 AM, it's in there, attributed.
One security note from Google's docs: change history does not track password changes.
What Google Ads change history won't tell you
- Anything older than two years. Data past the two-year window is gone. If a dispute with a former agency reaches back further, the platform can't help you.
- Anything, proactively. There are no change notifications. The log answers questions; it never volunteers.
- A 30-day window via the API. Tools and scripts read the change_event resource, which only supports queries within the past 30 days (10,000 rows max per query). Anything you want to keep programmatically, you must export monthly.
- Why performance moved. The log lists changes near a performance shift; it doesn't establish which one caused it. Three changes and a CPA jump on the same Tuesday is a lineup, not a verdict — that's a causal inference problem.
- Old granular performance data, soon. Separately from change history, Google's data retention policy effective June 1, 2026 limits daily, hourly, and weekly performance stats to 37 months via the API and scripts. Reconstructing what an old change did to daily performance gets harder over time.
How to undo a change someone made
Most changes from the last 30 days can be reverted directly: find the row in change history and click Undo in the “User / Date & Time” column. If the row says “Changes can't be undone,” an associated item was removed or someone already reverted it. Note that undoing a row with multiple changes reverts all of them together — check the details first.
How to get notified the next time someone changes your account
Finding the culprit once is detective work. Doing it monthly is a process failure. Two ways to close the loop:
The script route. Nils Rooijmans' free Change History Alerts script emails you daily when anyone outside a recognized-users list made changes yesterday. It's a solid free option with real limits — email-only, daily lag, per-account setup. We break it down in Google Ads change history alerts.
The monitoring route. The Ad Spend checks your account roughly every six hours and posts changes to Slack with the who, the what (old value to new value), and the when — across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit. Every change also lands in a permanent, version-controlled account history that outlives Google's two-year window and the API's 30-day one. Next time spend triples over a weekend, the Monday question isn't “who changed my Google Ads account?” — it's already answered in the channel.
Connect your account with Google's OAuth login — no scripts, no API keys — and get change alerts plus free performance and budget pacing alerts on The Ad Spend.
FAQ
How do I check who made changes in my Google Ads account?
Open the Campaigns menu and click Change history, or go to ads.google.com/aw/changehistory. Use the “By user” tab to see recent changes attributed to each user, and filter by user, tool, change type, or date range to narrow down a specific incident.
How long does Google Ads keep change history?
Two years in the web interface. The API's change_event resource, which scripts and tools query, only reaches back 30 days. For anything longer-lived you need an independent record, which is what The Ad Spend's permanent audit trail provides.
Does Google Ads change history show changes made by automated rules and tools?
Yes. Change history includes changes made via automated rules, the Google Ads API, and Google Ads Editor, and you can filter by the “tool” used. It does not track password changes.
Can I undo someone else's change in Google Ads?
Usually, if it happened within the last 30 days. Click Undo next to the change in the change history table. Some changes can't be reverted — for example when a related item has since been removed.
Can I get an alert when someone changes my Google Ads account?
Not from Google Ads itself. Use a Google Ads Script that emails you daily about unrecognized changes, or a monitoring tool like The Ad Spend that checks roughly every six hours and posts who-what-when change alerts to Slack.