Engaged minutes

The engaged minutes metric tells you how much time visitors are spending with content.

Parse.ly determines which of your site visitors are currently engaged with your content, producing and tracking a “heartbeat” for each visitor that’s engaged — this differs from Google Analytics’ Time on Site metric. Parse.ly’s approach not only makes it possible to track precise time spent, but also properly attributes time spent on richer content, such as video, long-form, and interactive.

Use cases

• Engaged minutes can be seen as a measure of “satisfaction” with content, especially for pieces meant to hold reader attention, like long-form writing or in-depth guides.
• You may use total engaged time as an equalizer across different types of content. Compare short pieces, meant to reach more people, more fairly with longer pieces, meant for smaller audiences.
• Use engaged minutes in context with visitor count: Pages with high engaged time but low visitors can be good candidates for additional distribution and promotion.
• Engaged minutes be an effective measurement for certain content tagging strategies, including word count or content type.

Pitfalls

• For certain content, a long engaged time could indicate some sort of visitor confusion.
• Understanding what a “good” average engaged time for a piece should be can take time and effort from your team.