The expert you are looking for is a record examiner
An attorney with a paid-search dispute usually arrives with one question: did the other side do something wrong inside this ad account? Two very different engagements hide inside it, and only one can be delivered honestly.
The first asks an expert to declare a norm — to say what a competent paid-search manager would have done, and measure the other side against it. There is no published standard of care for paid-search management to declare. No licensing body, no accrediting body, no professional association with practice standards and disciplinary authority publishes one. That absence is not a gap in the reading; it is the finding. Anyone who testifies to the industry standard in this field should be asked to produce the document, name its issuer and give its date.
The second engagement asks what the account record shows, and that one is available. An opinion that says no competent manager would have done this rests on a document nobody can produce. An opinion that says a conversion action was created on a stated date, that the tag was never detected on the site, and that a stated amount of spend ran while the bidding strategy optimized toward a signal recording nothing, rests on the record and on arithmetic anyone can re-run. Whether that breaches a contract or supports a claim is a question for counsel.
Three questions decide whether the record helps you
Three questions decide whether an examination is worth commissioning at all, and they have to be asked in this order.
- Does the record exist? Some things are never written down. Google Ads change history does not track password changes, and Google concedes that not all account-level settings changes, and not all changes made by Google representatives during consultations, are listed. The search terms report withholds queries below a volume threshold Google has never published, so no complete set of matched queries can be reconstructed from it. A theory that needs a record the platform does not keep is not improved by more effort.
- Is it still inside its window? Paid-search evidence ages out on published schedules, measured from the day the account is examined rather than the day of the conduct. The figures are in the table below.
- Who can reach it? A record that exists and is in date is still useless to your client if the counterparty holds administrative access and your client does not.
Sequence matters. Establish who can log in, export while that access exists, and only then build a theory. Reversing the order is how a matter reaches an expert with a developed argument and no record left to test it against.
Who holds the account is not the same as who paid for it
The most common surprise in an agency dispute is technical, not legal. Google Ads uses ownership as a specific manager-account status, and it does not follow the money.
A client account can have exactly one owner. Ownership is transitive, so a manager account that owns a client account confers ownership on every manager above it in the chain. It is created automatically when a manager account creates a new client account — nobody signs anything for that to happen — but a manager linking to an account that already existed does not get it by default and must be granted it. An owner manager account has full administrative and data access, and its admins can invite users, remove users, and grant or revoke administrative access on the client account. The client account still owns its data and can unlink a manager, which removes that manager's ownership access.
Read together, that means an advertiser who paid every invoice for years may hold no owner status at all, because the agency created the account under its own manager. It also means either side can sever the link, after which the severed side sees nothing. Which history occurred is a binary fact, discoverable from the account creation record and the manager link history, and it is usually the first thing worth establishing. The source is Google's own Manager Accounts (MCC): About ownership of client accounts, read August 14, 2026.
The clock, with the figures
This is the part of the subject with the most practical value, so here it is once, plainly. Paid-search records age out on published schedules. The clock runs from the date of examination, not the date of the conduct, and a preservation letter does not extend it — serving a demand changes no platform retention window and no party-controlled retention setting.
| Record | Window | Surface |
|---|---|---|
| Google Ads change history | 2 years | Web interface |
Google Ads change_event | 30 days | API |
Google Ads change_status | 90 days | API |
| Google Ads hourly, daily, weekly reporting | 37 months | Interface and API |
| Google Ads monthly and coarser reporting | 11 years | Interface and API |
| Microsoft Advertising change history report | 6 months | Reporting API |
| Meta Ads Insights aggregate totals | 37 months | API |
Sources, all read August 14, 2026: Google Ads Help, About change history and the Google Ads Data Retention Policy, the 37-month reporting cap effective June 1, 2026; Google Ads API documentation for the 30-day and 90-day change resources; Microsoft Learn, Reporting Data Retention Time Periods; and Meta for Developers, Ads Insights API Metric Availability Updates, effective January 12, 2026, where unique-count and hourly breakdowns drop to 13 months.
Three consequences follow. A dispute about conduct three years old may have no native change record left to examine. Microsoft Advertising keeps a richer change row than Google — it names the tool that made each change — over a window roughly a quarter as long. And Google Analytics retention is a dropdown a party controls: event and user-level data can be set to 2 or 14 months, and shortening it deletes the affected data on the next monthly cycle.
One exception is worth asking about early. Search Ads 360 change history reaches back to May 21, 2016 or later, far beyond native Google Ads, so ask whether it was in use before assuming the record is gone.
What the record settles, and what it only narrows
It helps to sort a dispute into one of three states before anyone is retained.
The record settles it. Some facts are written down with a user email and a timestamp. Whether campaigns were paused and when. Whether spend continued after a documented instruction to stop. Whether location targeting used the default option that reaches people in, regularly in, or who have shown interest in the targeted places, rather than presence only. Whether a conversion action existed, when it was created, and whether it ever recorded anything. Whether a competitor's mark appeared in served ad text. Whether platform cost reconciles to invoiced cost, month by month.
The record plus discovery settles it. Invalid traffic is the clearest example. The platform reports a count of filtered clicks and issues credits, but no advertiser gets a click-level ledger tying a filtered click to an address, device or source. The advertiser's own web server and CDN logs are the only place that traffic can be observed independently, and those are the client's to preserve. The same shape appears in affiliate and attribution disputes, where the raw logs rather than the network's summary report carry the finding.
The record does not settle it. If the fight is over what the contract required, what a charge to an advertising fund may properly cover, or whether a judgment call was reasonable, no export answers it.
What no amount of account data establishes
Every engagement should start with this list, because it stops a theory being built on a record that cannot carry it.
- Likelihood of confusion. No export shows it. Clickthrough rate is circumstantial at best — one appellate court treated very low rates as evidence against confusion, which cuts both ways. Confusion is normally a survey question.
- Intent. A keyword list shows targeting, not motive, which lives in internal messages and campaign briefs.
- What a competitor bid or spent. Auction Insights reports share-of-voice metrics — impression share, overlap rate, outranking share — never a competitor's bid, budget, cost or clicks, and nothing at all below a 10% impression share.
- Whether a change was approved. Change history captures the email attached to an edit, not consent. Shared logins, agency service accounts and API credentials collapse many people into one identifier.
- What would have happened instead. The account records what occurred. There is no counterfactual in it, and a before-and-after delta is a starting point rather than a damages figure.
- The exact ad one person saw. Responsive search ads assemble headlines and descriptions per auction. The record preserves the asset set and asset-level serving data, not every permutation. Absent a screenshot, that question usually has no answer.
What an engagement is made of, and what drives its size
Cost in this work is a function of scope, and the scope variables are knowable in the first conversation. What drives the hours: how many accounts and platforms are in issue; how long the period runs, and whether it falls inside the retention windows above; whether direct account access exists or every record arrives through production and has to be normalized before anything can be measured; whether reconciliation against billing records, agency invoices and the client's own order data is in scope; and what the deliverable is — a read for counsel, a written memorandum, or a signed report with exhibits.
Those variables move the effort by multiples rather than margins, which is why a scoped first step is usually right. A short examination establishing what records exist, who holds them and what windows apply is small relative to a full analysis, and it frequently ends the question — sometimes by showing there is nothing there, which is a result worth having before a client funds anything larger.
Whether the engagement is consulting or testifying also shapes what gets written down and when. That choice belongs to counsel, and it should be made at the start.
The boundary, stated once
Bill Hartzer is not an attorney. Nothing here is legal advice, and no page on this site offers a view on whether a claim is viable. The line is easy to hold: I establish what the account record shows and what it cannot, and counsel decides what that is worth.
Two further boundaries are worth naming, because attorneys reasonably expect one expert to cover everything. Quantifying lost profits belongs to a forensic accountant or economist; a paid-search expert who volunteers that figure has stepped outside the field, and what he should supply instead are the predicates the damages model rests on — what the account did, which spend is recoverable, and whether the compared periods measure the same thing. And admissibility procedure is not this site's subject. A finding has to survive challenge, which is a reason to build it on the record rather than on assertion, but the mechanics of the challenge belong elsewhere.
What remains is the part that is mine: what an account record contains, how it is obtained and verified, how long it lasts, and what it will not tell anyone however it is analyzed.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a PPC expert witness actually do?
He examines the paid-search record and states what it shows. In practice that means account ownership and access history, campaign settings and their change history, spend by day and campaign, the integrity of the conversion measurement, and reconciliation between platform cost, agency invoices and the client's own records. Each finding is tied to a place in the record, a date range and a method someone else can repeat. He does not decide whether conduct was reasonable, does not interpret the contract, and does not opine on whether a claim is viable — those are questions for counsel and, on damages, for a forensic accountant.Is there an industry standard for PPC management an expert can testify to?
No. There is no licensing body, no accrediting body and no professional association publishing practice standards with disciplinary authority for paid-search management. Google Ads certification is a product exam on Google's own platform, valid for a year; the partner program's thresholds measure spend volume and adoption of Google's own recommendations rather than client outcomes. The one genuinely published standard touching paid search is the IAB and Media Rating Council Click Measurement Guidelines of May 12, 2009, and it governs how measurement organizations count and filter clicks, not how anyone runs an account.How long does the Google Ads record last?
Change history is two years in the web interface and only thirty days through the API's change event resource, with a coarser ninety-day change status resource. Hourly, daily and weekly reporting data is held 37 months, with monthly and coarser aggregates held eleven years, effective June 1, 2026. Microsoft Advertising's change history report is six months. Those windows run from the date of examination rather than the date of the conduct, so a dispute surfacing three years later may have no native change record left, and a preservation demand does not extend any of them.The agency set up the account. Does my client own it?
Possibly not, in the platform's sense of the word. In Google Ads a client account has exactly one owner, ownership is transitive up the manager chain, and it is created automatically when a manager account creates the client account. A manager that merely links to an existing account does not get ownership unless the client grants it. Paying the invoices does not confer it. An owner's admins can grant or revoke administrative access on the client account, though the client account still owns its data and can unlink a manager. Which history occurred is checkable from the account record.Can a paid-search expert calculate my client's lost profits?
He should not. Lost-profits quantification is a forensic accounting or economics discipline, and a paid-search expert who produces the damages number is working outside his field. What he can supply are the factual predicates: how much was spent and on what, which spend was unrecoverable, whether the before period is a legitimate control, whether seasonality and the auction were accounted for, and whether the conversion definition or attribution model changed between the compared periods. That last point quietly destroys many before-and-after models, because the two periods are not the same measurement.What is the most useful first step in a paid-search dispute?
Establish who can log in, then preserve and export while that access exists. Access is the constraint everything else depends on: either party to a manager link can sever it, retention settings in analytics are a dropdown a party controls, and platform windows keep running regardless of what anyone has demanded. A complete export taken early is recoverable later only in the sense that nothing else is — communications, invoices and contracts survive, but the granular platform record does not come back once its window closes.Is an SEM expert witness the same as a PPC expert witness?
It depends who is using the term. Search engine marketing has meant, at different times, the umbrella covering both paid and organic work, and paid placement alone. When a retention letter says SEM expert witness, it is worth establishing in the first call which of the two is meant, because the records are entirely different: paid search lives in an ad account with a published retention schedule, and organic search lives in crawl data, rankings and search console. I take the paid side. The organic side is a separate examination and often a separate expert.Published · Last reviewed