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Report Dates Don't Match Another Tool

You compare "Tuesday" in Sealmetrics with "Tuesday" in another analytics tool, your ad platform, or your backend — and the numbers are shifted, especially around the start and end of the range. In most cases nothing is missing: the two systems are cutting the day at a different midnight.

How Sealmetrics assigns dates​

Every hit is stamped with a date calculated in your site's timezone at the moment it is ingested. The day rolls over at midnight local time for the site — not at UTC midnight, and not at your server's timezone.

Concretely: a hit at 23:30 New York time on Monday belongs to Monday in a site configured with America/New_York, even though in UTC it is already Tuesday 04:30. A tool that buckets by UTC would put that same hit on Tuesday.

New sites default to Europe/Madrid unless you change it.

Symptoms​

  • Daily totals are consistently shifted by a few hours' worth of traffic against the other tool, but multi-day totals for the same window roughly match.
  • "Yesterday" disagrees between tools, while "last 30 days" is close.
  • Discrepancies concentrate on the first and last day of the compared range.
  • A campaign launched late in the evening shows on one day in Sealmetrics and the next day elsewhere.

Diagnosis​

  1. Check both timezones. Find the site's timezone in Sealmetrics (see below) and the property/report timezone of the other tool (GA4 property timezone, ad platform account timezone, your database's GROUP BY timezone).
  2. Compare a wide window, not a single day. Pick a closed multi-day range (e.g. the 1st to the 15th) in both tools. If the total converges but individual days don't, the mismatch is the day cutoff — not lost data.
  3. Look at the edges. With different timezones, each day boundary moves a fixed number of hours of traffic from one day to its neighbor. The size of the daily shift should be consistent with the hour offset between both timezones.

If multi-day totals do not converge either, you are looking at a different problem — see Numbers lower than another tool and Reconciling with your ERP/CRM.

Solution: align the timezones​

Ideally, set the same timezone in Sealmetrics and in the tools you reconcile against.

To change the site's timezone in Sealmetrics:

  1. In the left sidebar, expand Site Config and click Settings.
  2. On the General tab, find the Timezone field.
  3. Pick your timezone (searchable by name or country) and click Save Changes.

Full walkthrough: How to Change Your Time Zone.

Changing the timezone affects new data only

The date of each hit is computed at ingest time with the timezone the site had at that moment, and stored. Changing the timezone re-buckets hits from that point forward; already-stored days are not recalculated. Expect one transition day with a slightly short or long bucket, then clean alignment.

Prevention​

  • Set the site timezone when you create the site, before collecting data, and match it to the timezone of the tools you report against.
  • When reconciling with a database or ERP, always state the timezone of both sides in the comparison query — this is one of the standard checklist items in the ERP/CRM reconciliation guide.