Apps data isn’t always realtime. If you enable offline app tracking, you will inevitably get late hits, which means yesterday’s data isn’t yet complete. But how long should you wait to assume that data is “complete” enough? In other words, you want to know a distribution of when late hits come in.

A quick primer on how offline hits work. If a user is offline using an app, the app will store the hit data in memory until the user comes back online. Often that is in a subsequent session. But is that 2 days, 1 week or longer? It depends on the type of app you have. Apps with high repeat frequency will see late hits come in sooner than apps with lower use. It also depends on how much functionality a user gets while being offline. Users can use a fitness or game app offline a lot more readily than an ecommerce or news app.

One way to track this curve is to pick one day to track, let’s say September 1. Then each day after and including September 1, you need to look at your traffic numbers until you feel the traffic has “settled out”. Then assume that September 1 is representative of all your days.

Or you can look at Adobe raw data to measure the time between two key time stamps: 1) the time the hit was collected by the app (while online or offline) and 2) the time the hit arrived at Adobe’s servers (note, only when the app was online).

In order to pull Adobe raw data, you have to be an Admin and you will see the “Data Feeds” link under the Admin menu. I won’t go into details here but a key thing to note is that if you want to open the data in Excel, you will want to try and keep the data under 15MB.

Here’s what you want to pull in:

1. post_cust_hit_time_gmt (the time the device collected the hit)
2. hit_time_gmt (this is the time Adobe received the hit)

Then convert the timestamps from unix to Excel using this formula:

= (((COLUMN_ID_HERE/60)/60)/24)+DATE(1970,1,1)

Then use this formula to subtract the two:

=DATEDIF(column1,column2,"d")

and get the number of days lapsed. Make sure you put the earlier of the two dates in the column1 place and the later date in column2.

Now you can create a pretty Excel chart that shows you the distribution of hit latency.