Sometimes the geographic reporting data on your campaigns might be different from the data in your publishers' reports. Here are some of the most common issues.
Incorrect trafficking
Discrepancies sometimes arise because ads were trafficked incorrectly, either in Campaign Manager 360 or in the publisher's ad serving system.
It's possible that due to miscommunication, you might apply one type of geographic targeting in Campaign Manager 360, while the publisher applies a different type of geographic targeting. For example, if you've targeted the ad to ZIP codes in Campaign Manager 360, but the publisher has targeted the ad to area codes, that could lead to both problems with delivery and discrepancies in reporting.
Similarly, if you've targeted different criteria within a category, it could create problems. For example, if you used country targeting to target France and Belgium, but the publisher only targeted France, that could lead to discrepancies.
These are just a couple of examples, but there are other ways that a disconnect between your trafficking and the publisher's trafficking could create problems. Please check your own trafficking carefully, and contact your publisher to ensure that they've trafficked your ads properly.
Different counting methodologies
Even if all of the trafficking has been done correctly on both the advertiser and the publisher side, you can expect to see discrepancies in geographic reporting when publishers use a non-Campaign Manager 360 reporting system. That's because each system uses its own methodologies for geographic reporting.
IP addresses
Reporting uses IP addresses as the basis for geographic reporting. If the publisher's system isn't based on IP addresses, then it's not directly comparable with Reporting. Some commonly used methods include user-entered data (where the users identify their location as part of a signup process), country top-level domain names, and query parsing.
Geographic data sources
Different ad serving technologies use geographic data from different vendors and sources. That means that even if the publisher's system uses IP addresses, they might assign a different geographic location to the same IP address, based on a different database of geographic information.
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Country: Country reporting is usually pretty accurate, and you shouldn't expect to see large discrepancies based on different geographic data sets.
- Local: At more granular levels, such as cities, ZIP codes, and so on, discrepancies are more common.
"Not set" in reporting
If there isn't enough accurate geographic data, reporting will display “not set”. This is most common when pulling geographic data at local or other granular levels, but can still occur with broader dimensions, like country.
Discrepancies between Reporting and Google Ad Manager
If your site publisher uses Google Ad Manager, you might see discrepancies in geographic data. That's because Ad Manager uses an updated framework for geographic reporting. Minor to moderate discrepancies in geographic reporting are to be expected.
To learn more about other common causes for reporting discrepancies, you can also see Display & Video 360: Reporting Discrepancies.