Discrepancies between Google Ads API and Dashboard

[Jeffrey Hall]

Our company is pulling daily reports on all our mutual clients currently using google ads for paid media.  We have an issue where among all of our daily reports per client, roughly 15~20% of those reports do not match the metrics presented on the google ads dashboard.  We usually don't notice these discrepancies until a few days after we pull these reports and store them.  There does not appear to be a common pattern, for these have been found across various mutual clients and various days.

Originally we were pulling a whole day's metrics per client the following morning at 8am UTC.  I have recently made a change on our company's API to wait one more day before calling Google Ads API to see if this would help, but this has not appeared to help.  

Here is an ss of the query string we are using in our API:

Since we want daily reports, the start date and end date we provide are the same date.

I am not sure why majority of our reports we get back from Google's API are 100% accurate when cross checking them with the dashboard days later.  I can confirm that when we do discover that one of our reports are off for a particular day for a particular client, I will run the report again and the metrics we get back from Google's API indeed do match that of the dashboards.

Any advice? Could the issue be that waiting 24hrs before pulling these metrics is not enough time to account for adjustments being made on Google's end regarding invalid clicks, etc.?

Thanks in advance!

[Google Ads API and AdWords API Forum]

Re-posting the last inquiry ( https://groups.google.com/g/adwords-api/c/ojVo2Uys9Ck) from the forum as it wasn't routed to our support queue.

Kind regards,
Darwin

Google Ads API Team

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hi,

Thank you for raising your concern to our team. Allow me to provide support to your concern.

Could you confirm if my understanding is correct that the data discrepancies are encountered when comparing the present Google Ads UI records with the API reports that have been generated on the previous days? If yes, then please note that in this scenario, data discrepancies between the UI and API might be encountered and let me explain why. Please note that the data / statistics of the API and UI is following the data freshness, this means that the data / statistics will be adjusted on specific time. With this, the data from the API reports that have been generated from previous days are not adjusted or updated so it is not aligned with the data of the UI. That said, when comparing API and UI data, you need to ensure that both are generated at the same time.

Let me know if you have further questions.

Regards,

Ernie John Google Ads API Team

ref:_00D1U1174p._5004Q2g1sYY:ref

[Jeffrey Hall]

Thank you for your response.  We figured it was an issue with data freshness and the timing of adjustments.  I appreciate your help!