Data feeds best practices

Ensure that you communicate any anticipated traffic spikes ahead of time. Latency directly impacts processing time for data feeds. See Schedule a traffic spike in the Admin user guide.

Data feeds do not contain a service-level agreement unless explicitly stated in your contract with Adobe. Feeds are usually delivered within several hours after the reporting window passes, however can occasionally take up to 12 hours or more.

Hourly feeds using multiple file delivery process the fastest. Consider using hourly multiple file feeds if a timely delivery is a high priority for your organization.

If you automate your feed ingestion process, consider the possibility that hits and files can be transferred more than once. Your feed ingestion process needs to handle duplicate hits and duplicate files without erroring out or duplicating data. We recommend using the combination of the hitid_high and hitid_low columns to uniquely identify a hit.

In rare cases, you may see duplicate hitid_high and hitid_low values. If this happens, confirm the file was not previously sent and processed. If only some of the rows in a file are duplicate, consider adding visit_num and visit_page_num to help determine uniqueness.

If using FTP (not recommended) ensure that you have ample room on your FTP site. Remove files from the destination on a regular basis so that you don’t inadvertently run out of disk space.

If using sFTP (not recommended), do not read or delete files with a .part suffix. The .part suffix indicates the file is partially transferred. Once the file is transferred, the .part suffix disappears.