You may have heard that
we launched local time zone reporting for AdSense, a fantastic feature for publishers far from the Pacific Time Zone (PTZ)! On the API side we’ve been asked some questions about it, as in some cases this may lead to the AdSense web interface and the AdSense Management API showing different data.
In Version 1.3 of the AdSense Management API, the
report.generate call has a new, optional parameter called
useTimezoneReporting. If set to
true, the report will be generated in the local time zone configured in the web interface. Note that billing is still based on PTZ, so if you want to fetch actual earnings you may want to make sure that
useTimezoneReporting is set to
false or you might see small discrepancies.
The default value for this parameter is
false resulting in PTZ being respected, as it was before the feature was added. If an AdSense user doesn’t choose a local time zone it will default to PTZ, so this parameter won’t make a difference.
Our recommendation is that developers let users choose if they want reports in their “Billing time zone” or their “Local time zone” (to match AdSense’s terminology).
Bear in mind that users changing their local time zones can generate spikes or dips in the local time zone reports, as it makes the day of the change longer or shorter.
You can read more about this in the
AdSense blog, and the AdSense help center has
instructions on how to enable the feature.
- Jose Alcérreca, AdSense API Team
