Mobile app: How can we capture 'total number of [a specific action]' without triggering reporting calls for every single action?

[philschmidt]

The application team would like reports by visit, user, by day/week/month/etc. for 'total number of [a specific action]' and correlate that info with other dimensions. I'm concerned about the potential (and likely) high volume of reporting calls from this particular action, so I'm looking suggestions for capturing this information in fewer reporting calls.

Because this is a mobile app (using Tags/Launch and the AEP Edge extension in case it matters), I'm wondering if this could be accomplished if the application kept a running total 'number of [specific action] events since last send' that is sent (along with any dimensions for desired correlations) in context data at the time of any lifecycle calls. This 'number of [specific action] events since last send' that's temporarily stored in the application would be reset by the application whenever it's sent in a lifecycle call so the collected data could then be summed/averaged/etc. via a custom event in reporting. For this to work the overall total within each visit would need to be reliably collected and associated with the corresponding visit (not the subsequent visit) by one or more lifecycle calls, and I don't know if that's possible at all, or only with specific lifecycle calls.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

In theory that sounds like it might work. Mobile Apps require that developers determine when to make the tracking requests, so they can store information and pass it through to you in a format of your choosing.

What you might want to do before getting your developers involved is to try and send context data to a dev suite (using web since you can fully control it) and see if you can create processing rules that allow you to get the granularity and data that you need to report on.