Events & Ticketing

Wrong event time on Google, and why editing your website won't fix it

A start time that is wrong in one place is a typo. A start time that is wrong in five places, none of which you can log into, is a different kind of problem with a different kind of fix.

Two hours before doors, somebody calls to ask whether the event really starts at seven, because that is what their phone says. Your sign, your page, and your staffing plan all say five. You correct the caller, hang up, and get back to work, because there are eleven other things happening. That call was not a customer service moment. It was the only warning you are going to get.

The reflex is to open your website and check whether the event start time is incorrect there. Your website is right. It has been right the whole time. That is exactly why this is worth understanding, because the natural conclusion, that the caller was confused, is wrong, and the correct conclusion is that a copy of your event exists somewhere with a different time on it and you cannot reach it from your admin panel.

The difference between a web edit and a feed correction

Almost every frustration in this area comes from not knowing which of two situations you are in. They look identical from the outside and require completely different actions.

To fix an event listing online you first have to know which of the two you are looking at. A web edit is a page somebody typed by hand and can retype. Your own event page. Your social post. A partner's blog. If it is wrong, a person changes it and it is fixed permanently in about a minute.

A feed correction is a page that was generated automatically from a record held in a service. Performer schedules on music and event apps work this way. So do most what-is-on-this-weekend aggregators. There is no text box behind those pages. Something published a data record, and every page you can see is a rendering of it. Editing your own website changes nothing at all, because your website was never the source.

If the same wrong detail appears on four unrelated sites, it is not four mistakes. It is one record being copied four times, and only the record can be corrected.

How to tell which one you are dealing with in five minutes

1. Write down the correct detail. Then search your event and open every listing you can find, including apps, aggregators, and any performer or vendor site.
2. Record what each one says. Not roughly. Exactly, including whether it says the show time or the door time, which are different facts that constantly get merged into one.
3. Look for the pattern. If one page disagrees and the rest agree, that page is a hand-typed mistake. Fix it and you are done. If several unrelated pages all carry the identical wrong detail, you have a feed problem.
4. For a feed problem, find the origin. Ask the question who benefits from publishing this data. A performer's schedule feed almost always originates with their booking or management service, not with you. An aggregator listing usually originates from a scrape of your own page at a moment in the past, which means your page may have been wrong once and is now right, and the old value is frozen out there.

That last case surprises people the most, and it is the same mechanism that leaves an event listing with no way to buy a ticket. A stale scrape means the internet is faithfully reporting a version of your event that was accurate in April. Correcting your page in August does not update it, because nothing re-reads your page on a schedule you control.

What actually fixes a feed

A wrong event time on Google, on a music app, or on a performer's page is corrected in one of three ways, in order of how well they work.

• Go to the party who owns the record. For a performer's schedule, that is their booking or management contact, not the app displaying it. One correction at the source propagates to every page fed by it, which is the entire advantage of a feed once it is working for you rather than against you.
• Use the listing service's own correction channel. Most aggregators and event apps have a support address or a suggest-an-edit control. It is slower and it is per-site, but it works, and it is the only option when the record originated with a scrape rather than a partner.
• Make your own page unambiguous so the next scrape cannot get it wrong. Publish the door time and the start time as two clearly separate, clearly labelled facts. Most merged times come from a page that stated one number and left the reader to guess what it referred to.

What does not work, and consumes an afternoon anyway, is editing your own website repeatedly and refreshing the wrong listing hoping it catches up. It will not catch up. It is not looking at you.

Why a two-hour discrepancy costs more than it sounds

A wrong time does not simply annoy people. It sorts your guests into two groups who then have incompatible experiences of the same event.

For farms, wineries, and agritourism venues running a gate, this splits the night in half. Guests who found you through your own page arrive when you expect them. Guests who found you through the performer, the app, or the aggregator arrive on a different schedule entirely, and every one of them arrives after the thing they were promised has already begun. They do not conclude that a listing was wrong. They conclude that your event was disorganized. Some of them tell people that.

Meanwhile you staffed, poured, and prepped against your own number. The kitchen is ready for a crowd that shows up late in a clump, the early period looks dead, and the shift that most needed help gets it two hours after it was needed. Nothing about that reads, from the inside, like a data problem. It reads like a bad night.

Check it eight weeks out, not eight days out

There is a reason to do this early that has nothing to do with being organized. Feed corrections are the slowest kind of fix, because they depend on somebody outside your business acting. A partner has to answer an email. A listing service has to process a request. None of that is under your control, and none of it happens in forty-eight hours.

Eight weeks out, a wrong time is a request somebody handles. Eight days out, it is unfixable, and your only remaining option is to staff for both times and absorb the cost. The check itself takes five minutes either way. The timing is the whole thing.

Our free Brand Continuity Snapshot includes exactly this comparison, taken from public listings, with the page and line where each detail was found. It is a no-cost first look, and the earlier it lands relative to your next event, the more of it can still be corrected. If the disagreements turn out to run across your whole calendar rather than one date, the Brand-to-Revenue Continuity Audit is the longer version of the same work.