User Engagement Analytics Based on Web Contents

Abstract

User engagement is a relation of emotion, cognitive, and behavior between users and resources at a specific time or range of time. Measuring and analyzing web user engagement has been used by web developers as a means to gather feedback information from web users in order to understand their behavior and find ways to improve the websites. Many websites have been successful in using analytics tools since the information acquired by the tools helps, for example, to increase sales and the rate of returning to the websites. Most web analytics tools in the market focus on measuring engagement with the whole webpages, whereas the insight information about user behavior with respect to particular contents or areas within webpages is missing. However, such knowledge of web user engagement based on contents of the webpages would provide a deeper perspective on user behavior, compared to that based on the whole webpages. To fill this gap, we propose a set of web-content-based user engagement metrics that are adapted from existing web-page-based engagement metrics. In addition, the proposed metrics are accompanied by an analytics tool which the web developers can install on their websites to acquire deeper user engagement information.