As you’re reviewing AdMob reports, it's important to consider how long it takes for ads activity to reflect in your reports. Ads activity data isn’t available instantly, and some metrics are only updated once a day.
When analyzing your ads activity performance, it's helpful to know that some recent activity data may not be showing up yet, especially reporting performance data from third-party waterfall APIs.
How it works
While most reports and metrics are continuously updated, some take longer to process or are only calculated once a day (rather than on a continuous basis).
Daily processing for some of these reports happens at the same local time in all time zones. You need to factor in your local time zone to determine when these metrics will be ready.
About AdMob and third-party metrics
Part of understanding data freshness in your reports is knowing that some metrics come from AdMob and others are third-party sources. While there is no specific third party metric, data freshness does depend on the ad source.
Example: The Est. earnings and Observed eCPM metrics contain both AdMob and third-party data. If the Ad source is the AdMob Network then the Est. earnings and Observed eCPM are Google data and have the shortest delay. If the Ad source is a third-party network, then Est. earnings and Observed eCPM are pulled from third-party APIs and take longer. Learn more about Latency times.
In most cases, your AdMob metrics (such as clicks and impressions) are delayed by approximately 4 hours.
You use the Ads Activity ready-made reports to review ads performance data for third-party waterfall sources. Unlike bidding sources, AdMob needs to pull the waterfall data from third-party reporting APIs, so you might notice a significant delay when accessing ad performance data from these sources.
It’s important to note that third-party data latency can differ between networks. This means you view data about your waterfall ads performance from different ad sources at different times based on how third-party ad sources process their data.
You might notice that metrics from some third party sources have a significant delay. For example, Ad Source A calculates data about your ads performance every 4 hours. However, Ad Source B calculates data once a day around 9 p.m.
Refer to the Latency table for more information.
Latency times
This table provides a breakdown for the latency times of ad sources and when you can expect this data in reporting.
| Ad source | When your data will be ready |
|---|---|
| AdMob | AdMob is usually updated in 4 hours. |
| Bidding | Bidding is usually updated in 4 hours. |
| Waterfall |
You might notice that metrics from some third-party sources have a significant delay. The expected data freshness depends on the frequency we pull data from third-party APIs for third-party waterfall ad sources. These third-party ad sources latency times are broken down by:
|
Adjustments
Fresh data might change a bit before being finalized. Your data might appear incomplete within the first couple hours.
Your metrics may occasionally be updated for a number of reasons, including but not limited to:
- Spam adjustments
- Bug fixes
If adjustments are made to any payable events (revenue earnings) in a subsequent month, they are listed as payment adjustments.