The first section you come across when you are building a rule with us is the Ad account section. Here you select the ad account you'd like your rule to work with. Each ad account has a specific timezone it works with. If you'd like to check the timezone your ad account is in, the following articles may prove to be helpful: Meta Ads, Google Ads, Snapchat Ads, and TikTok Ads.
Time zone
After the ad account is selected you go through other sections to build the rule exactly how you want it. At the bottom of the rule-building page, there is a Schedule section that defines when and how often your rule will check the conditions. You can find more info about the Schedule section here.
Please note that the system picks your ad account timezone by default, and when you choose to run the rule on specific days and times, the rule will run its checks according to the timezone selected under the Time Zone section.
Timezone is different from the timezone of the ad account
Let's see what when happens if the ad account timezone and the timezone selected at the bottom of the rule are not aligned.
Say, you set up a rule to pause your active ad sets that spent over $100 Today at 12 PM every day of the week:
Your ad account is in the New York timezone (GMT - 5:00) and you selected the London timezone (GMT +0 during winter months and GMT+1 throughout summertime).
The metric values in the rule conditions will be reported according to the ad account timezone, so in the rule above Spend Today is going to be the spend for Today as per the New York timezone. If the timezone selected in the Time Zone section does not coincide with that of the ad account, you may see discrepancies in the data shown in the logs.
Timezone in the condition is different from timezone in the rule
If you choose conditions Time greater than / Time less than in your rule, you will notice a timezone setting next to each condition. You can see more examples of rules with Time greater than/ less than in this article.
The timezone selected here is used to check whether the time during the given rule check meets the specified condition. If you choose a custom schedule for the rule with Time greater than/ less than, we recommend that you use the same timezone in the conditions and in the Time Zone section.
If you choose different timezones, the rule will most likely misfire, here is an example:
Imagine, you specified the timezone in the conditions of the rule as (GMT - 8:00) as shown in the screenshot above. And you set your rule to run at 9 AM because you want the conditions to be met during this scheduled check.
However, you used (GMT - 5:00) timezone, which is different form the timezone in the conditions:
In this case, the rule will check at 9 AM by (GMT - 5:00) and the conditions of the rule will not be met and the rule will not fire:
9 AM (GMT - 5:00) = 6 AM (GMT - 8:00), 6 AM (GMT - 8:00) is not greater than 08:00 AM (GMT - 8:00) ➡️ the condition is NOT met
AND
9 AM (GMT - 5:00) = 6 AM (GMT - 8:00), 6 AM (GMT - 8:00) is less than 10:00 AM (GMT - 8:00) ➡️ the condition is met
The conditions are connected by AND operator, hence if one of them is not met, the rule does not fire.
Timezone in the logs
It is also worth mentioning that the time of the checks you see in the logs is shown according to the timezone of the viewer. If we get back to the circumstances similar to the ones described above - the ad account is in the New York timezone (GMT - 5:00) and you are checking the logs from London (GMT +0 during winter months and GMT +1 throughout summertime) - the latter timezone is the one in which the checks are going to be shown to you in the logs.
Please account for the above when you are setting up the rule checking schedule.
If you still have any questions left, shoot us a message at support@bir.ch or via in-app chat bubble, and we'll be happy to answer them! 🙌