Wordrive understands himself and Apple reporting

Last time, I began to talk about my own experience in promoting the Wordrive game in the AppStore and the intricacies associated with it. The material was interesting to the audience, we will continue.

Today I will touch on the topic of statistics. In the comments to the past material, I tried to find the answer to the question - what is “yesterday” in terms of the App Store statistics system? It turned out not so obvious.


Not everything is clear from the documentation: there is an indication that the CET time zone is used for Europe, PST is used for the Americas, and that the statistics will be available exactly 10 hours after the end of the PST. It did not answer the questions whether yesterday is PST or whether this concept depends on the country ...
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In this article I will explain. Perhaps, they may seem banal to some people, then it means that some of my articles have “grown out”. But on RIFE, on the net, I “tortured” many people with this question and no one could give me a clear answer. So suppose my research can be useful.

So, the Apple documentation (namely, iTunes / App Store Reporting Help 2.0 ) states the following (I quote literally with a technical translation into Russian):

• A day in terms of the Apple AppStore is a period of time from 12:00:00 am to 11:59:59 pm in the time zone used "for this territory" (see table below)
• Week - Monday 12:00 am to Sunday 11:59 pm
• What time are the reports based on?
  

  US, Latin America, Canada	Pacific Standard Time (PST)
  Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, Pacific	Central Europe Time (CET)
  Japan	Japan Standard Time (JST)
  Australia, New Zealand	Western Standard Time (WST)

• When are reports available? Reports are generated after closing operations in the last timezone (which is PST). Consequently, reports are usually available around 10:00 am PST for the previous day or week. Earlier access to reports for other time zones (for which operations have already been completed) is not available.

In the end, it is clear a little. What is meant by territory? Territory of the registration of the author of the program or the territory where the sale is made? Both options have the right to exist - but the numbers will be different.

Here is an update or an advertising campaign yesterday. On what day should we expect its response in the form of increased sales - today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow?

I dug over the entire Internet, but did not find an intelligible answer to the question. Therefore, the reflections below claim to opinion, I hope, turning into the truth.

First, remember the timezone. Apple's documentation cited above mentions PST, CET, JST and WST.

• PST is so-called. Pacific time, Pacific Standard Time. It is 8 hours behind GMT (GMT + 8). This is the latest time zone of continental America.
• CET is so-called. Central European time. It operates in most countries of Europe.
• Western Standard Time is one of the time zones in Australia.
• JST - Japan Standard Time, time in Japan.
• GMT / UTC is GMT. The time corresponding to the time zone passing through a piece of UK.

There are many countries where for the summer time is transferred back and forth for an hour, so for each particular country the scale can be shifted relative to GMT differently at different times of the year. But we can still neglect this, so as not to complicate the thought.

Look at this picture:


If a territory is a registration territory, then we belong to Europe, and data are collected by CET time. The CET time is different from Moscow time, apparently, by three hours. Consequently, in this case, the statistics will be three hours behind the calendar day, that is, the data for yesterday will be, in fact, data for a 24-hour period ending with today's three o'clock in the morning. BUT THIS IS NOT SO, BECAUSE THE ASSUMPTION IS INCORRECT . More precisely, not so for sales to other territories, except Europe and Russia.

Under the territory, as I managed to understand, it is still understood the territory of the purchase of the game . Accordingly, “Yesterday” means the time corresponding to yesterday for the time zone selected for the sale territory of the game instance.

As a result, we have under “yesterday” what is highlighted in yellow in the figure. And in the projection on Moscow time, this “yesterday” takes 42 hours, almost two days! . But for each country from these 42 hours there are 24, for which sales are taken into account.

Hence, it turns out that Russian and European sales are accounted for the 24-hour period from 3 am yesterday, until three in the morning , Moscow time . American sales - from noon Moscow “yesterday” until noon Moscow time “today”.

For example, for my Wordrive game , on Saturday, April 23, at 6:44 am Moscow time, the first update was released - interface defects were fixed and the content was slightly expanded. At the same time, in the statistics that I received at 15:30 of the same Saturday, figures on updating the previous version by users from the USA appear as data for “yesterday”. Because at the time of 6:44 in the USA there was still six hours before the closing of "YESTERDAY" in the PST time zone.

I will finish the article with one of the expressions in the theme from the Wordrive update, released this morning: “ Time reveals all that is hidden and hides all that is clear .” So it is always useful to understand it.