Average Engagement Time
The average time a page spends as the focused tab in a visitor's browser, counting only the moments someone is actually present.
Analogy Mental model
The time a customer genuinely spends reading the menu, not the time the menu sat on the table while they took a phone call.
In practice What you actually do
On long-form reviews and guides, a minute and a half to three minutes is a strong signal that people are reading rather than scanning. Eight seconds usually means they read the opening, decided it was not the answer, and left.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Older analytics recorded zero seconds whenever a visitor read one page for twenty minutes and closed the tab. The modern heartbeat-based measurement fixes that, which is why historical comparisons across the change are meaningless.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →