Strange CONVERSION_PRECEDES_CLICK error, cannot understand the reason

[Oleksandr Dyklevych]

Hi,

in our company, we have quite many AdWords accounts, and for most of them we have set up offline conversions upload procedures.

So, from our back-ends we get gclid, conversion time, conversion value, and timezone based on back-end settings.

it all works fine for most of the accounts, but for one account 50% of uploads fail with CONVERSION_PRECEDES_CLICK error.

I double checked all the configurations on our end, the timezone is set correctly, but still.

I know, that gclid is a protobuf message that also carries a timestamp, but i cannot find the way how to decode it. There are some links when i search in the Internet, but they are outdated.

I would like to get some help in understanding the reason of the error - is it a wrong set up in AdWords account? Maybe tracking was set under some wrong timezone? how can i see it?

[googleadsapi...@google.com]

Hi Oleksandr, 

The error usually occurs if the conversion is reported to have happened before the click. To avoid this, you will need to make sure that the conversion time should be set after the click occurred. Could you please check the time zone when the click happened? You can look up the time zone of a customer using the CustomerService. The Customer object has a dateTimeZone field which includes this information. You can compensate for this by either converting your times to customer time zone (to match the API). 

If you are still experiencing issues after this is done, please send me your SOAP request and response through reply privately to author, so that I could take a look. 

Thanks,
Bharani, Google Ads API Team

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