Report "account timezone" has incorrect offset

[Brandon Parise]

I pull a report @ 3:30PM EST and this is an example row:

98697020,2012-08-13,15,(GMT-05:00) Eastern Time

The problem here is that currently Eastern Time is GMT-04:00 due to daylight savings.

This is causing some confusion on our end because 3PM @ -05:00 offset is actually in the "future"

Brandon

[Kevin Winter]

Hi Brandon,

  The account timezone is chosen and fixed in place upon account creation.  The data and statistics will always be in that timezone.  For the most part, this doesn't matter because we don't expose time values in reports.  It does come into play when scheduling report downloads.  You could think of your account as a member of a timezone that doesn't obey daylight savings time.  The Timezone returned by the API doesn't change, but YOUR timezone does (due to daylight savings time).  As a result, you'll need to adjust when a report runs to follow daylight savings time to make sure that the report contains the data you expect - i.e. that you are pulling data three hours behind the account timezone.

Please note that we don't recommend relying on the hour-by-hour changes in reports.  Not all statistics are available on an hourly basis, see here for more details.

- Kevin Winter

AdWords API Team

[Stefan Podkowinski]

Hi Kevin

Your statement on how accounts won't obey DST is contrary to what I understand how AdWords handles account timezone settings. 

E.g. refer to "Data impacted by daylight savings time" at http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2404039

If the AdWords API won't make any DST adjustments, how would any API and frontend data match up at all during the summer time?

[Kevin Winter]

Hi Stefan,

  The timezone returned by the AccountTimeZoneId is the effectively timezone for the account.  If I go to sign up for a new account, the timezone I can select is GMT-5 Eastern, not GMT-4 due to daylight savings time. The value from the report matches that.

- Kevin Winter

AdWords API Team