Data Latency

The delay between event and its appearance in reports — a property to publish, not hide.

Latency varies by pipeline stage: clicks stream fast; conversions wait on postbacks; revenue waits on settlement and adjustment cycles; corrected “final” numbers may trail days.

Operational treatment

Publish expected latencies per metric in reporting UIs (partners refresh dashboards during campaigns — tell them what they’re looking at), timestamp data currency on every view, and distinguish provisional from settled figures visibly. Analytics teams should trace latency budgets end-to-end; the intermittent six-hour postback queue that nobody documented becomes “the platform loses conversions” in partner folklore, a reputation cost out of all proportion to the engineering fix.