GA4 Reporting Issues
GA4 Reporting is a little different than its predecessor (Universal Analytics, sometimes called GA3). Some of the most common differences are that it just takes longer for the data to pull in. Reporting is not complete until two days later.
Mediavine pulls in your traffic details based on a Google API and currently (June 30, 2023) that API is experiencing a bug that pulls in incorrect pageview metrics. Pageviews are part of Google's Session calculation, so in some instances, if pageviews are incorrect, sessions metrics (that were unaffected by things like this in GA3) are also incorrect.
What This Means for You
Your earnings for "yesterday" will still show in the dashboard the following day, however
The most important thing to know is that THE REVENUE IS CORRECT. Your actual money is unaffected by this bug.
The Earnings displayed in your dashboard come from the ad server. Not from Google analytics. Impressions and CPM are the building blocks of your ad revenue.
Impressions = How many ads you served, including video and refreshes
CPM = How much advertisers are spending per 1000 impressions
So if we never ever were able to connect your dashboard to Google analytics, you'd still have accurate reporting from the ad server, and the money would be right.
The trouble is, that without analytics, it is difficult to measure your own performance relative to your traffic.
Mobile and Desktop In-Content Site Health Reports, as well as Sticky Sidebar Site Health Reports are affected by incorrect analytics. So are devices, country reports, and page level data, and of course, RPM.
What You Can Do
If you think that RPM calculations look "off", you can open up your Google analytics dashboard and compare. If you've implemented analytics correctly, what's in Google analytics reporting should be right.
Compare that to what you see in the Mediavine Dashboard (again, be sure you are checking the day before yesterday).
If the sessions in the Dashboard do not match up to what you can see in analytics for the day before yesterday OR if you need to know your RPM for yesterday before the API data is available:
You can manually calculate RPM.
Revenue / Sessions from Google analytics * 1000 = Session RPM
Revenue / Pageviews from Google analytics * 1000 = Page RPM
Where Can I See Sessions and Pageviews in GA4?
Sessions can be viewed on the home screen in GA4. ***Be sure the date range is set to 'Last 30 Days'. Mediavine uses Sessions, not Engaged Sessions in the Dashboard. Learn about the differences here.
In your GA4 Dashboard, you can see pageviews by going to Reports > Engagement > Pages and Screens. ***Be sure that you adjust the date range to match the Mediavine dashboard date range in the drop down menu in the upper righthand corner. Keep in mind "last 30 days" in GA will include yesterday, and your Mediavine dashboard will not, so you'll need to adjust that accordingly.
What's Next
Mediavine Engineering and Data Teams are hard at work to put together a workaround for the GA4 API bug we are experiencing. They have also reached out to Google and are working with API engineers to resolve things. This may take awhile, but hopefully we will be able to backfill any missing data for you.
We will keep you updated on progress and issues via Dashboard messaging.