Help · Data Availability
Webhooks and Forward-Only Data
Why some sources have no past, and what that means for your reports.
A webhook is a message a tool sends Ghost when something happens. It is the fastest way to receive data and it has one consequence that matters: there is nothing to send about events that happened before the webhook existed.
A source like that is forward-only. Ghost labels it as such rather than leaving you to notice the hole.
What it means in practice
- Pages covering dates before the connection will be empty for that source, permanently.
- Totals for earlier periods are not wrong; they are incomplete, and Ghost says so on the page.
- A date range that straddles the connection date mixes a partial period with a complete one. Compare like with like.
What to do about it
Nothing, usually. The history fills in from the connection date forward, and after a few weeks the forward-only source is the complete one. Where a historical import is possible for the same kind of data through a different tool, Ghost's setup for that source says so.