Parse.ly’s engaged time heartbeat

Parse.ly measures engaged time differently — and more accurately — than most analytics platforms, tracking a “heartbeat” for each visitor that’s engaged on your site.

Traditional time-on-site measurement

Many analytics platforms, including Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, measure engaged time based on a visitor’s entry event (when they come to the page) and exit event (when they leave the page to go to another on your site), both of which come with a timestamp. From there, these platforms calculate the time delta between each of those events per visitor session to find time-on-site.

However, this cannot take sessions that do not include an exit event into consideration. For example, if a visitor comes to your site, then goes to another site or leaves the tab open, an exit event is never recorded.

Single-page visitors can comprise anywhere from 30-70% of an audience. That’s a pretty substantial chunk to leave out of any benchmark analysis of time-on-site.

Parse.ly’s engaged minutes

To avoid the issue of exit events, Parse.ly uses a “heartbeat” pixel to measure the engaged minutes metric. This pixel pings every several seconds to check if a visitor is still active on a page:

1. The browser tab is open.
2. The user is presently engaging with the page. Parse.ly detects this by identifying cursor movement (scrolling, video playing, clicking, etc.).

After five seconds of inactivity, the heartbeat no longer considers the visitor engaged, and time stops tracking. Tracking picks up again later if the visitor reengages with the page.

Since Parse.ly isn’t dependent on entry/exit events, measuring audience engagement is more precise. This includes time spent on the final page in a visitor’s session and single-page visitors. And while heartbeat pixels still technically estimate actual time spent, they are markedly more accurate in terms of actual engagement on the page.