Tracker timezone vs network timezone — align before you reconcile

Tracker timezone vs network timezone — align before you reconcile

A mismatched timezone silently breaks daily reconciliation and cap timing. Decide and align on day one.

The two clocks:
— Your tracker stamps clicks and conversions in its configured timezone.
— The network stamps and caps conversions in theirs — often UTC or US/Eastern.

When mismatch bites:
— Daily numbers won't reconcile — a conversion lands on different "days" in each system.
— Caps reset at different hours; you overspend in the gap window.
— A spike near midnight splits across two reporting days, faking a low day.

How to decide:
— Set your tracker to the network's timezone if you have one dominant network — reconciliation becomes trivial.
— Run multiple networks on different timezones → set tracker to UTC and convert per-network in reporting.

Tradeoffs to log:
— Matching one network's TZ = easy reconciliation with that network, harder with others.
— UTC baseline = neutral but every reconciliation needs a conversion step.

Rule: pick one canonical timezone for the tracker, document it, and offset every network's report to match. Never compare two systems on different clocks.

Save this SOP. Run this before every launch.