Do you use this?

I admit I feel a bit ridiculous. I was working with someone who was sharing her screen displaying Ads Manager, and I saw something I had never seen before.

It’s a feature that I know exists, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it activated. She seemed a bit surprised that I had never seen it before, so maybe this is nothing new to you either.

Regardless, it’s pretty useful!

When you customize the date presets in Ads Manager, turn on the “Compare Dates” slider. Your selected dates will appear in blue and the previous period in gray.

When you click to update, you might not see anything special at first. Then hit the arrow to expand the columns.

For that metric, you’ll get separate columns for:

• Your selected period
• Prior period
• Change
• Change percentage

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the change percentage before, and it displays in red or green depending on whether the change was positive or negative.

I’m probably going to regret sharing this and I’ll be flooded with comments about how this has existed for 10 years in this current form. But for all of the screen shares I’ve done with advertisers over the years, I swear I’ve never seen this before. I’d otherwise use breakdowns by time period to get similar data.

Am I the only one who never used this before?

Yeah, probably. But super useful.