Data Taking Longer Than Expected to Appear
Sealmetrics processes hits in seconds, not hours. Each hit travels through an ingestion pipeline — the tracking pixel receives it, hands it to a processing queue, and a consumer writes it to the reporting database — and the whole trip normally completes within seconds of the visit. There is no daily batch and no scheduled report refresh to wait for.
If data seems delayed, the goal of this page is to distinguish the three very different situations that look identical at first glance: the hit never arrived, the hit arrived but your report isn't looking at it, and the pipeline is briefly catching up.
First check: the "Last hit" timestamp
The fastest source of truth is the Last hit timestamp at the top right of the Overview report. It shows when the most recent hit for the site was received, and it updates within seconds of a tracked visit.
- Open the Overview report for the site.
- Visit your website in another tab (with no ad blocker interfering).
- Reload the Overview: Last hit should move to "seconds ago".
| Observation | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Last hit updates within seconds | Ingestion is healthy. If a report still looks empty, the problem is on the report side — see below. |
| Last hit does not update after your test visit | The hit never arrived. This is not a delay — it's a tracking problem. |
| Last hit lags by minutes during a big traffic spike | Brief processing delays while the queue catches up are normal under spikes; data is not lost, it arrives slightly later. |
If "Last hit" updates but a report looks empty
The hit arrived; the report just isn't showing it:
- Date range. Make sure the selected period includes today — several default ranges end yesterday. See Date Range.
- Timezone. "Today" is defined by the site's timezone, not yours. Near midnight, your test hit may fall on a different report day than you expect — see Report dates don't match another tool.
- Filters and segments. An active filter (source, country, content group…) can hide the fresh hit.
- The specific report. Conversions appear in the Conversions report, not as pageviews — a successful conversion test doesn't move the Pageviews number.
If "Last hit" does not update at all
Then nothing is being ingested for the site and there is no delay to wait out. Work through the usual silent causes, in order of likelihood:
- The beacon never left the browser — script blocked or missing. See Quick Diagnostics and CSP errors.
- The tag is gated behind consent in GTM — see GTM Consent Mode blocking.
- The page's domain is not authorized for the site — the hit is rejected silently. See Unauthorized domain.
- Your test traffic is being filtered as a bot — automated or scripted visits don't count. See Test traffic blocked as bot.
When to contact support
If the site receives real traffic, the tracker verifies correctly in the Network tab (beacons returning 204), and Last hit still stalls for more than a few minutes, contact support@sealmetrics.com with your Site ID and the timestamp of a test visit — that is enough to trace the hit through the pipeline.
Related
- See Your Data Flow — what a healthy first-data experience looks like.
- Overview Report — where the Last hit timestamp lives.
- Quick Start — verification — the standard install verification steps.