Hierarchy of organizations, accounts, users, properties, and views.

Organizations

Products and users are collected together in organizations. An organization represents a company, and lets you access your company’s product accounts (e.g., Analytics, Tag Manager, Optimize), and manage product users, permissions, and cross-product integrations. Organizations are optional, though recommended for the benefits they provide.

Accounts

An account is your access point for Analytics. One or more Analytics accounts can belong to an organization.

You need at least one account so you can have access to Analytics, and so you can identify the properties you want to track. How you manage the relationship between accounts and properties is up to you. You can use a one-to-one relationship of one account/one property, or you can use a one-to-many relationship of one account/many properties. You can have multiple Analytics accounts. 

Properties

A property is a website, mobile application, or device (e.g., a kiosk or point-of-sale device.) An account can contain one or more properties.

Within an Analytics account, you add the properties from which you want to collect data. When you add a property to an account, Analytics generates the tracking code that you use to collect data from that property. The tracking code contains a unique ID that identifies the data from that property, and makes it easily identifiable in your reports. Analytics also creates one unfiltered view for each property you add.

Views

A view is your access point for reports; a defined view of data from a property. You give users access to a view so they can see the reports based on that view’s data. A property can contain one or more views.

For example, within a property you might have:

• one view of all the data for www.example.com
• one view of only AdWords traffic to www.example.com
• one view of only traffic to a subdomain like www.sales.example.com

When you add a property to an account, Analytics creates the first view for that property. That first view has no filters, and so includes all the data for that property. You should leave this original view unfiltered, so that you always have a view in which you can see all the data. You can create additional views and apply filters to them so that they each include the specific subset of data in which you’re interested.

Once you create a view, the reports for that view will show data from the creation date of the view forward. For example, if you create a view on June 1, that view will show data from June 1 forward, but will not show any data collected prior to June 1.

If you delete a view, that specific perspective of the data is gone forever. Don’t delete a view if you think you might ever want to report on that particular perspective of the data.

Users and permissions

You add users to an Analytics account. You can add those users at the account, property, or view level; and you can restrict their access at each level. When you add a user, you identify that person by an email address that is registered in Google accounts, and you assign the appropriate permissions. Depending on the permissions you assign, that user can manage other users, perform administrative tasks like creating additional views and filters, and see the report data.

The group has permissions for the level in the Analytics hierarchy where you create the group. For example, if you create the group at the view level, then it has permissions only for that view. If you create it at the property level, then it has permissions for that property and all its views. If you create it at the account level, then it has permissions for all properties and views.

See your account history

Your Google Ads account contains a history of changes that shows what you’ve done in the past. This change history can help you better understand what events may have led to changes in your campaigns’ performance. You can see up to 2 years of changes. This article explains how to find and use change history in your account. It also explains how to undo changes.

Instructions

See your change history

1. Sign in to Google Ads.
2. In the page menu on the left, click Change history.
   • Below the performance graph, you’ll see counts of different change types. Clicking on individual change types will filter the list below to show only changes from that type.
3. To see changes for a particular date range, select the dates in the upper right corner.
4. To select the scope of the changes you want to see, use the navigation panel on the far left. (If you’re using a smaller screen, you may need to expand the panel by clicking the arrow icon .)
   • To see changes for all your campaigns, click All campaigns.
   • To see changes for a particular campaign type, click that campaign type.
   • To see changes for a particular campaign, click the campaign’s name.
5. To see details of a change, click the arrow icon next to the change.
6. To filter your change history, follow the instructions to filter your view of performance data.

The filter options are:

• Campaign – campaigns that changed
• Ad group – ad groups than changed
• Change type – filter by the type of change made
• User – filter by the user(s) who made changes
• Tool – filter by the tool used to make changes
• Item changed – filter by specific items changed
• Campaign experiment – filter by campaign experiments changed

View performance statistics for only affected campaigns or ad groups

From change history, you can go to a filtered view of your performance statistics to see only the campaigns or ad groups that were affected by selected changes. Sign in to your Google Ads account.

1. In the page menu on the left, click Change history.
2. To see changes for a particular date range, select the dates in the upper right corner.
3. To select the scope of the changes you want to see, use the navigation panel on the far left. (If you’re using a smaller screen, you may need to expand the panel by clicking the arrow icon .)
4. Select the changes you’re interested in seeing by selecting the checkboxes next to each change.
5. Click Go to to see a drop-down that displays the number of ad groups or campaigns that have changed.
6. Click ad group or campaign to see a filtered list of all campaigns or ad groups that changed.

• The types of changes you can see
• You can see the following kinds of changes in your account change history:
• Ad: Actions taken to create, edit, pause, resume, or remove an ad
• Budget: Adjustments to your campaign’s budget, but not shared budgets
• Bid: Adjustments to your ad group and keyword bids
• Conversions: Actions taken to create, edit, or remove conversion actions
• Network: Changes to the ad network(s) your campaign is targeting
• Keyword: Actions taken to add, pause, resume, or remove keywords; adjustments to a keyword-level maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bid or landing page
• Status: Actions taken to pause, resume, or remove a campaign, ad group, keyword, or ad
• Targeting: Adjustments to language and location targeting

In addition to changes made directly in your Google Ads account, your change history will show changes made via automated rules, Google Ads API (AdWords API), and Google Ads Editor.

Your change history doesn’t track password changes (for security reasons).  

Undo changes

You can undo most types of changes, as long as they were made in the last 30 days. Undoing reverts the change to its previous state.  If there are multiple changes listed in the same row, “Undo” will undo all of these changes together.

Changes eligible for undo have an option to undo in the “Date/User & Time” column. If a change can’t be undone, it will say “Changes can’t be undone” in the “Date/User & Time” column.

Here’s how to undo changes in your account history:

1. On your change history page, identify the row with the set of changes you want to undo.
2. Click Undo in the “Date/User & Time” column.You’ll see a message confirming that you want to undo the changes.
3. Click Undo.
4. You’ll now see “Changes undone” in the “Date/User & Time” column.

In rare cases, you won’t be able to undo changes even if you’ve clicked Undo. Google Ads will let you know if that happens. This could be because an associated item has been removed since the change was made, or someone else with access to your account has already undone the change since you last refreshed the page. 

Add change history columns to your statistics tables

You can see a tally of the changes made to your account by adding change history columns to your “Campaigns” and “Ad groups” pages. To do this, follow the instructions to add or remove columns in your statistics table.

To find change history columns:

1. Sign in to Google Ads.
2. In the page menu on the left, select the type of metric you’d like to view (Campaigns, Ad groups, etc.)
3. Click the columns icon just above the statistics table.
4. Click Modify columns. You can find the “Change history” column by scrolling through the list of column types.

• The total displayed in the “All changes” column is not the sum of the other change history columns in your table. It’s the total number of changes you’ve made. For example, say you pause an ad. The “Ad changes” column and the “Status changes” column would each show 1 change, because pausing an ad is both a change to the ad and a change to the status. However, the “All changes” column would only show 1 change, not 2, because you only made 1 change.
• Some changes, like changing the name of an ad group, are only displayed in the “All changes” column. This is because they don’t fall into any of the other change categories. This is another reason why you should not consider the “All changes” column a sum of the other change history columns.
• Changes made yesterday are displayed after 10 a.m. Pacific Time (PST) today. Changes made before May 19, 2014 are not shown.

Differences between Google Ads and third-party data

Advertisers often notice two kinds of differences between the data in their Google Ads accounts and those in their web server logs or third-party tracking software. One type occurs when your Google Ads statistics show more overall clicks than your logs or tracking software report. The other occurs when your Google Ads account shows fewer overall clicks.

While these discrepancies may be significant and at times surprising, they don’t necessarily mean that there was some sort of invalid activity with your ads. We’ll look at some common reasons for these discrepancies and offer tips to help you accurately track your clicks.

Reasons that your Google Ads account may show more overall clicks

We’ve found that most discrepancies between your Google Ads statistics and your web logs or third-party tracking software occur because third-party tracking methods are unable to detect all the clicks that your ads receive. There are several reasons for this:

• Repeat clicks: Customers may click your ad several times when, for instance, comparison shopping or conducting research. Your third-party tracking software may not count these repeat visits to your site. As long as the click patterns don’t fit a profile of abuse or invalid activity, however, they’ll be counted in your Google Ads account statistics.
• Google Network statistics: Google displays ads on a growing network of search and content sites and products. Typically, web tracking software isn’t able to recognize clicks from Google Network sites as being affiliated with Google. These clicks are generally labeled only with the third-party site name.
• Browser limitations: There are limitations to your third-party tracking software’s ability to track website visits with referrer headers. Most of the newer Internet browsers automatically pass along a referrer header when a customer clicks your ad and is brought to your site. However, some customers deactivate this feature in their browsers. Also, some proxies and corporate firewalls strip out the referrer headers.
• JavaScript not enabled: If your third-party tracking software uses cookies to record referrer headers, ad clicks that occur in a browser without JavaScript enabled won’t be tracked. Your Google Ads account, on the other hand, will record clicks that occur in browsers with or without JavaScript enabled.
• Redirects: You can include redirects within your final URL as long as the redirect shares a domain with your display URL. Manage your third-party tracking in URL options.

Reasons why your Google Ads account may show fewer overall clicks

Occasionally your Google Ads account may show fewer clicks than your web logs. Here are some explanations for this mismatch:

• Filtered clicks: Google’s click protection technology may have automatically filtered out clicks that we determined to be invalid and prevented them from being charged to your account. You can see data on the invalid clicks that are automatically filtered from your account or specific campaigns.
• Repeat visits: A customer might — after clicking on your ad — visit another link within your website and then hit the browser’s back button. She might also bookmark the landing page and later return to your website directly through this bookmark. In both cases, the landing page will be reloaded and the third-party tracking software might count those as additional clicks.

Increase your tracking accuracy with Google Analytics

To accurately track traffic to your ads, we recommend using Google Analytics, a free, comprehensive tracking tool. Advertisers who create a Google Analytics account automatically enable a useful feature called “auto-tagging.” Auto-tagging appends a unique identifier to an ad’s final URL each time it’s clicked, which makes it much easier to distinguish real ad clicks from misleading behaviors such as page reloads. Google charges at most once for each unique tag (if we determine that the click is valid).