AdWords, Dates, Times and a World Business

Published on July 14th, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

You may find Google’s use of dates and time zones to be confusing. It may not be your problem, but a Google problem. Here’s a practical example of the kind of confusion that the AdWords user interface can offer. I have a client on the East Coast of the US, with an AdWords account set to the East Coast. Google is on the West Coast. I’m in the UK. This creates plenty of opportunity for confusion about when, precisely, things are supposed to happen.

Rght now, it is 01:27 AM BST (that’s 00:27 Universal Time) or 8:27 pm Eastern or 5:27 pm Pacific. It’s also July 14 for me, and July 13 for the US. So take a look at this screen shot:

If I select “Today” then the User Interface shows the date as the 14th July and the 13th July. The stats reported are updating for the 13th July, but the graphing tool is showing “Today” as the 14th. There are no clicks in reports or in the UI, for July 14th, only for July 13th. It’ll become even more complicated in a few hours, when the East Coast crosses midnight. Use the wrong mix of Ad Scheduling times and you may never work out exactly when the adverts are actually running, as Google becomes confused about which of the three possible time zones is being referenced, and which tool is being set to use which TZ.

Reporting Delays

Complicating this even further is Google’s little note in faded grey at the bottom of the stats table:

Yup – “clicks and impressions in the last three hours” and “24 hour delay in conversion reporting”.

The good news is that the delays aren’t usually that much. That chart above shows some conversions. It’s probably close enough to right. AFAICS, the stats *USUALLY* take about 45 minutes to stabilise. There’s some delays that can cause the stats to lag for longer, and, more importantly for many users, the numbers may decrease over three hours and even for a matter of months later. That’s because the invalid impression and invalid click detection software (click fraud detection) takes a while to work out that a user has a pattern suggestive of suspicious behaviour. The UI and reporting tools do not report clicks, but *billable* clicks. That means you can see a click, which is later withdrawn. In extreme cases you may see a conversion with neither impression or click – someone, identified by Google as a likely fraudulent user, has purchased a product but their impressions and clicks have been ignored.

So, if you believe anything, believe that the latest updating stats are substantially correct for billing purposes as of about 45 minutes ago. Definitely don’t go adjusting your bids as if the stats were being reported in real time… And it becomes more complex yet when you consider the delays in reporting stats in Google Analytics. A topic for some other time, perhaps. :)

Summary

If you think that you’re confused about when something is happening with when things appear to occur in AdWords, it sometimes appears to confuse and puzzle Google, too. Be aware that you may know more about what time events happened locally, than Google does.