I’ve recently experienced a glitch in Google Ads that’s been quite the headache. It has unexpectedly removed the option for adding notes in some accounts, making change tracking and documentation far more challenging. I know how important these notes are for keeping track of optimizations and performance shifts.
This issue was initially brought to my attention by Odi Caspi, a fellow paid search consultant. Over the past couple of weeks, the problem has surfaced sporadically, causing quite a bit of disruption. Let me share what advertisers are meant to see in their dashboard:
I find it incredibly essential to understand why we care about this issue. Account notes are an invaluable tool for agencies and in-house teams to trace changes over time. When we lose the ease of access to these notes, troubleshooting performance fluctuations becomes tougher, and our collective memory weakens.
In accounts affected by this bug, the “Add note” option simply vanishes from the popup where I usually annotate changes. It’s an intermittent issue, with the functionality sometimes working perfectly and disappearing at other times.
As for workarounds, Caspi mentions that clicking on an existing note could reveal the option to add a new one. However, this method works only if there’s already a note available within the current date range we’re examining.
Another workaround I came across, suggested by Paid Media Specialist Dids Reeve, involves opening the Notes panel from the “More” menu. It seems this option still allows for adding notes in some cases.
Looking forward, it’s frustrating not knowing when Google might officially recognize or address this bug. Until it’s resolved, I’ll need to be more vigilant about documenting significant changes using alternate methods.
The first reported instance of this glitch came from Caspi himself, who shared insights from his campaign reports on LinkedIn.
Inspired by this post on Search Engine Land.
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