Review and apply changes
Read a run's history, check the changes an automation proposes and apply them.
An automation that changes your account never writes to Google Ads as part of its run. It works out what it would change and records that as a set of proposed changes on the run. You then decide.
This is the safety net. It lets you watch an automation for a few runs and see whether you agree with it before you hand it the keys.
Run history
The History tab on the Automations page lists every run, newest first. You can filter it by account and by automation. A run has one of four statuses:
- Pending is queued but not started.
- Running is in progress. The page refreshes itself while a run is active.
- Completed finished successfully.
- Failed stopped on an error. The run shows what went wrong.
Select a run to open its log. What the log shows depends on the automation: a report, a list of findings or, for the automations that change things, the proposed changes.
Proposed changes
A run that proposes changes shows them in a table. For a budget change you see the campaign, its current daily budget, the proposed one, the size of the change and why the automation wants it. For keywords you see the ad group and the search terms it would add.
Above the table, a line tells you where the proposal stands: how many changes are ready to apply, and that nothing in your account has been touched yet.
Some rows can be marked as rejected, with a reason. Those are changes the automation wanted to make but Google Ads will not accept, so they are shown for transparency and skipped when you apply.
A run that found nothing simply says so. That is a normal result, not a failure. It means nothing in the account met the thresholds you set.
Applying
Press Apply these changes. Flowboost sends the accepted changes to Google Ads and updates the run to show what happened.
You need a Flowboost plan to apply changes. The Google Ads account and its connection also have to be active, since a disconnected or deactivated account must not be written to.
Three outcomes are possible:
- All applied. The run switches to Changes applied and the button goes away.
- Some applied. Google confirmed part of the set and not the rest. The run tells you how many are confirmed. The unconfirmed ones may still have gone through, so check the campaigns named before you change them by hand.
- Nothing applied. The run explains why.
A proposal can only be applied once. If an apply is wholly refused, that proposal is closed and the Apply button does not come back. The next run proposes fresh changes based on current data, which is the safer behaviour: budgets and search terms move, and re-sending a stale proposal could act on numbers that are no longer true.
Applying automatically
Each changing automation has an Apply automatically setting under Execution in its configuration. Turn it on and a scheduled run applies its own changes as soon as it finishes, with no review step.
Everything else stays the same. Runs are still recorded, changes are still listed and you can still see exactly what happened after the fact. The only difference is that you are reading the history rather than approving it.
We suggest leaving it off until you have watched a few runs and agree with what the automation proposes. It is most useful once an automation is tuned and boring.
When nothing happens
If an automation is active but you see no runs, check in order:
- Is a schedule set? An active automation with no schedule never runs.
- Is the account still connected and active? A revoked or deactivated Google Ads account stops runs.
- Does the organisation still have a plan? Scheduled runs stop without one.
The run history is the fastest way to tell the difference between an automation that is not running and one that runs but finds nothing.