This document summarizes a talk given by Josh Schwartz from Chartbeat about measuring user engagement on websites. The talk discusses how traditional metrics like clicks are insufficient for understanding content consumption and proposes new metrics to capture engaged time by tracking things like window position, scroll depth, and time spent on a page. It also provides a brief introduction to Chartbeat and Josh Schwartz, and describes the data architecture and research process for analyzing user browsing sessions at scale.

1. Open Analytics NYC 2013
Measuring how users
consume content on the
web
Josh Schwartz, Chartbeat

2. About Chartbeat
• Founded in 2009
• Focused on realtime analytics
• Used by 8/10 top US publishers
• Analyzes over 1B browsing sessions per day
• Handles over 200K requests per second at daytime
peak
A quick introduction

3. About me
• Background in machine learning and computer
vision
• Data Scientist at Chartbeat
• Currently focused on researching user engagement
on the web
A quick introduction

4. What on my site are visitors
actually reading?
Content consumption

5. Creating new metrics for user
engagement
• Research process
• Backend infrastructure
• As many insights as I can fit in
This talk

6. Event based metrics are
insufficient.
Clicks measure engagement
with links, not with content.
Content consumption

7. Measuring between clicks
{window_top: 100,
window_height: 700,
doc_height: 3400,
time_on_page: 90,
...
}

8. Counting engaged time
{window_top: 100,
window_height: 700,
doc_height: 3400,
time_on_page: 90,
engaged_time: 62,
...
}

9. Data architecture
In-memory DB
(realtime traffic)
MongoDB
(page-by-page
historical)
AWS Redshift
(user-by-user
historical)

10. Where do they scroll?

11. How do they scroll?

12. Where do they engage?

13. Why does it matter?

14. Why does it matter?

15. Questions?
Josh Schwartz
josh@chartbeat.com
@joshuadschwartz