Google have very recently introduced a new feature in Google Analytics called Change History.
What is Change History?
Change History is found as a new tab at account level in Analytics, found next to the Account Settings and Data Sources. It is a simple table that shows changes made within the last 180 days to your Google Analytics account settings. It’s available to users who have admin access to accounts. The sort of thing that Change History will tell you is, ‘On Wednesday 20th February, at 09:38:04 GMT 2013, someone@sleepinggiantmedia.co.uk created new goal Newsletter Sign Up’. The date, email address and change fields within the table are all searchable.
Why is this a good thing?
Change History keeps a log of changes that are made through the Google Analytics interface so changes to accounts, properties, profiles, filters, goals, users and AdWords linking. Change History means less reliance on annotations and it will make it easier to identify causes of changes in data. Currently, if a goal is set up or amended, and an annotation is not made, it can be hard to tell what causes a change. Rather than wonder if something just mysteriously changed or disappeared, you can now open Change History to see exactly what happened and when. This is particularly handy if there are multiple users managing an account. However, it doesn’t track changes made to the website itself or to the tracking code. It also won’t tell you if someone missed a tag off a page, so manual annotations will still be necessary to an extent.
Our opinion
Anything that helps us to understand changes to data can only be a good thing. Change History doesn’t mean that there’s no need to keep a manual log of changes made but offers a great backup, especially when there’s more than one person managing an account.