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Google AdWords New Feature: Choose Your Time Zone - Change Wisely

Posted: May 2, 2006

Google has announced a new feature, one that allows you to change the time zone in your AdWords reporting. However, there are a few important pieces of information to consider before changing your account settings.

First, let’s examine what Google has to say:

Currently, all AdWords accounts are set to Pacific Time. However, in the coming weeks you?ll see a message in your account inviting you to set your account’s local time zone. This means your entire account, including all ad serving, reporting, and billing, will be calculated and managed according to the time zone of your choice.

It?s important to note that your account time zone can be set only once, so please choose wisely! Also, if you don’t select a different time zone, your account will remain on Pacific Time.

Source: AdWords Blog

Your Options:

Set the time zone to your server:

This will create a scenario where it will be easier to audit your server logs and compare it to charged AdWords traffic. As all the major search engines are on the west coast (MSN, Google, Yahoo), this seems to make sense on the surface. However, if Google introduces features such as day parting, click to call during business hours, etc, then you’ll be doing a lot of math to ensure you’re targeting the correct hours.

An easier fix if you are on a dedicated server is to change your server settings to your own time zone (or a time zone equal to your paid traffic source). Also, if you ever switch hosts, then the work of coordinating these time stamps is now incorrect. Remember, its a permanent AdWords setting, so use cautiously.

Agencies: Set all the advertiser time zones to your time zone

If you do hosting, manage reports for many different companies, have a custom tracking system, etc, this seems to be a logical choice as you can now evaluate traffic as it relates to your management systems. However, the disadvantages are the same as above. Just because it makes agency life easier, doesn’t mean its in the advertiser’s best interest.

Set the time zone to the local business time

If Google introduces new features like day parting, then you can coordinate your AdWords account with the hours your business is open.
If AdWords introduces click to call, then you can easily manage the campaign so that it only runs when your business is open.

This seems to be a feature no one considers in the pay per click market unless they have experience with Ingenio on AOL or other pay per call systems.

In most of the pay per call scenarios, a call isn’t charged until the call time breaks 10-18 seconds. However, with answering machines, late night call centers, etc - its easy for someone to break this barrier when leaving a message. As pay per call’s purpose is to connect a live potential customer with a live service agent, one only wants to pay in scenarios where this occurred.

Ingenio currently has settings where the ad is only shown during business hours. One would speculate that with Yahoo and Google experimenting in this arena, they would introduce similar features for local businesses so they can take full advantage of this offering.

Conclusion

Unless you have a strong reason to change this setting right now - I’d suggest waiting. Google is always rolling out new features, and this one is setting up future offerings. It might be best for most companies to wait until those future offerings arise before changing a settings that’s currently marked as permanent.

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