Time Zones
LightLead handles dates and times with time zone awareness at every stage of data processing.
Storage standard
All timestamps are stored in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) in ISO 8601 format:
2026-01-15T14:30:00ZThis ensures data is unambiguous regardless of the user's or the source's geography.
Source time zone
Each source (ad account) has its own time zone, set when it was created:
- Google Ads: configured by the user
- Facebook Ads: configured at the ad account level
When loading data from a source, LightLead:
- Retrieves data in the source's time zone
- Converts it to UTC for storage
- Converts it to the time zone specified in the report settings for display
Report time zone
When creating a report, you can specify the timezone parameter. If it's not set, the first source's time zone is used.
Available values are IANA Time Zone Database identifiers:
Europe/Moscow(UTC+3)Europe/London(UTC+0 / UTC+1)America/New_York(UTC-5 / UTC-4)Asia/Yekaterinburg(UTC+5)- and others
Impact on reports
The time zone affects:
- Day boundaries when grouping by day
- Time display in datetime-typed columns
- Preset range calculation (today, yesterday)
- Comparison with the previous period
Example:
An event happened on January 15 at 01:00 MSK (January 14 at 22:00 UTC).
- If the report is in
Europe/Moscow— the event falls on January 15 - If the report is in
America/New_York— the event falls on January 14
Recommendations
- Use the time zone of your primary ad account
- Don't change a report's time zone after historical data has accumulated — this can cause duplicated or skipped days
- For cross-channel reports, normalize all sources to a single time zone