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Conversion latency and postback loss
A fast diagnosis guide for understanding conversion delay, loss points, and recovery tactics in KiwiWall traffic systems.
KiwiWall
ยท
Jul 03, 2026
ยท
10 min read
Conversion latency and postback loss in brief
Latency is usually not one incident. It is often an accumulation of timeout windows, payload mismatch, and delayed retry handling. The goal is to make every conversion path explainable by stage.
Who this is for
- Campaign operators managing S2S reliability.
- Technical teams comparing postback arrival versus event quality.
- Support leads resolving delayed payout disputes.
Definition
Conversion latency is the time between conversion event and reliable acceptance by your downstream systems. Loss is conversion data that never reaches your payout logic or reaches too late to be counted.
Primary loss points are:
- callback timeout
- malformed payload
- duplicate suppression over-aggressiveness
- status mapping errors
Decision table
| Latency pattern | Common cause | Response |
|---|---|---|
| Steady baseline increase | Queue or retry saturation | Add retry visibility and queue health monitoring |
| Spikes around peak traffic | Downstream processing limits | Temporarily throttle high-risk sources |
| High variance by objective | Objective-to-offer routing mismatch | Validate objective tags and conversion tables |
| Flat low count despite stable clicks | Payload drops or malformed IDs | Run payload schema validation and endpoint tests |
How it works
- Capture arrival timestamps at each hop.
- Calculate p50/p95/p99 latency by objective and source.
- Compare raw conversion logs with accepted postback logs.
- Isolate loss by source and by offer class.
- Fix the slowest hop first: network, retry policy, or mapping.
Checklist
- Instrument timestamp at click, conversion, postback receive, and acceptance.
- Track p95 latency per source and objective.
- Set loss-alert thresholds and ownership per stage.
- Audit retry counts, dedupe windows, and timeout settings.
- Re-test after each routing change.
Conversion link
Use this as part of the Performance tracking and fraud control sequence before scaling via Advertiser performance scaling.
Next up
Week one launch timeline