Buried deep in your analytics, you'll likely find some strange URLs reporting into your Analytics > Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
Search for "fbclid" or "epik" and you'll likely see what I mean.
(Want to hit the easy button? Here's a link that'll let you import a custom dashboard showing your fbclid pageviews over time and your top 10 posts showing fbclid traffic.)
At the ad server level, we automatically filter these common UTM parameters OUT of your URLs. That means that revenue earned for www.domain.com/post and www.domain.com/post?fbclid will be reported under the regular URL in your Mediavine Dashboard's page-level data.
The problem comes in when you have significant amounts of Facebook or Pinterest traffic and do NOT filter out the fbclid and epik UTM codes from the analytics view that is connected to your dashboard because it'll report ALL of the revenue for the posts under the regular URL, but not all of the pageviews. That can show artificially high page-level RPM data if you get significant Facebook or Pinterest traffic.
Thankfully, there is an easy fix for this.
How to improve the accuracy of your page-level data in your Mediavine Dashboard
Identify and locate the view that is connected to your Mediavine Dashboard.
This is ideally going to be a view set to the New York timezone. (If you haven't set that up yet, check out this help doc, and please take care of that now!)Navigate to the View Settings.
Add "fbclid,epik" to the "Exclude URL query parameters" box.
If you use Google Web Stories, add a comma and "_gl" to the box also.
Click "Save".
Want to add all three? Here's an easy copy and paste for you.
fbclid,_gl,epik
From the time you hit "Save" and going forward, your analytics will strip the "fbclid", "epik", and _gl from the URLs, and the accuracy of your page-level data will improve.
IMPORTANT NOTES
If you use the "fbclid" or "epik" data for your marketing strategies, you'll want to make sure you set up a separate view that gets connected to your Mediavine dashboard that you can use the query param exclusion on.
By default, our Dashboard will connect with the view that is set to the NEW YORK timezone. That means if you'd like to set up a new view that excludes the "fbclid", "epik", and "_gl" query parameters while maintaining your existing view and the data as it is, you'll want to change the time zone on your existing view to something other than New York, and make sure to select New York when creating your NEW view that excludes "fbclid", "epik", and "_gl".
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out and let us know!