All review reporting and download files will now be updated with additional data points to support localized reporting. The recent enhancement for review timestamp location is adding complexity to all aspects of review reporting. Even the idea of 'all the reviews from yesterday' takes on a different meaning depending on the time zone for each of the locations in the report. This update provides access to the data points necessary to validate all reports and downloads.

Details

In Review Settings, users can decide whether to report reviews using UTC or the local time zone of each location. If set to Time Zone of Location, the platform will append the equivalent local time for the review. To see the details, there are now four (4) columns in each review download file:

CreateDate(UTC)

‍The date and time of the original review in UTC and remains static for the review record.

CreateDateLocal

The date of the original review adjusted for the calculated time zone for the location. If the platform cannot determine the correct time zone, this field will populate with the UTC time stamp of the review.

Date(UTC)

This record represents the most recent date and time of the review. It will either match the CreateDate or reflect the most recent review update received.

DateLocal

‍This record represents the most recent date and time of the review, adjust for the time zone of the location. It will either match the CreateDate or reflect the most recent review update received.

The column order has also been updated to organize the fields more logically.

What's Next

The extra data will help us build custom reporting with greater visibility to localized times zones and the existence of any reviews initially held by Google and later released.