ONLINE USER ENGAGEMENT

User engagement is a multifaceted, complex phenomenon, and as such has given rise to a number of approaches for its measurement. Common ways of measuring user engagement include: self-reporting, e.g., questionnaires; observational methods, e.g., desktop actions; and online analytics, which employ online behavior metrics that assess users' depth of engagement. These approaches represent various trade-offs between the scale of data analyzed and the depth of understanding. In this tutorial, we focus on the later, large-scale online analytics. Within this approach, the most common way that engagement is measured is through various proxy measures of user engagement. Standard metrics include number of page views, number of unique users, dwell time, bounce rate, click-through rate, and return rate. We will review these metrics, and discuss what they measure, their advantages and drawbacks. We will provide extensive details on the appropriateness of these metrics to various types of online..