Understanding change detection
Advec spots changes to your clients' campaigns, works out who made each one, and turns the risky ones into alerts.
How Advec finds a change
On a schedule, Advec reads each ad account's campaign settings and compares them with the last read. Any difference is a change: budget, status, bid, targeting, tracking, creative or schedule. Each change records the old value, the new value and what it belongs to.
How often that read happens depends on your plan, and decides how quickly a change is found. See the table on What Advec alerts on.
Who made it
Advec also reads Google Ads change history and Meta's activity log, and matches each entry to the change it explains. That adds who made it, not speed. A change's Changed by line shows a name and one of:
- a person — someone editing in the platform, Google Ads Editor or a bulk upload.
- an automation — automated rules, scripts, recommendations, Advantage+ and similar.
- the platform — Meta's own system, review and learning events.
- unknown — the platform didn't say.
Recognised people
For the first 7 days after Advec first reads a client's change history, everyone who makes a change is added to the client's Recognised people automatically. After that, a status, removal, budget, bid, targeting or tracking change by someone not on the list is marked not recognised and moves up a tier (budget and tracking stop at operational). An ad account added later gets no learning week. See Managing clients for how to add someone, or click Mark as recognised on one of their changes.
From change to issue
Every change gets a tier — critical, operational or ambient — from what changed and by how much. For example, a budget increase of 50% or more that also clears the client's budget floor is critical, pausing a campaign is operational, and a creative edit is ambient. What Advec alerts on lists them all.
Each change opens an issue or joins the open one for the same entity and kind. A change that reports a problem going away, such as an account returning to active, resolves the issue instead. Only critical and operational issues send an alert; ambient ones wait in the inbox and the digest.
More than 10 changes in one check of an account become a single Bulk edit issue.
If you've narrowed a client's tracked campaigns (Edit tracked campaigns on the client page), changes outside that selection don't open issues. By default the whole account is tracked.
Issues made of changes don't resolve on their own: resolve them once checked. Ambient ones close after 7 days with no new occurrence. To read a single change in detail, see Reading a change.