3 ms·
To be fair, you can't tell how long someone spent looking at page using just cookies. You can't distinguish between me (a) loading your page then immediately cl
by twic 6y ago
To be fair, you can't tell how long someone spent looking at page using just cookies. You can't distinguish between me (a) loading your page then immediately closing it, (b) loading it, reading it for ten seconds, then closing it, (c) loading it, reading it for ten minutes, then closing it, and (d) loading it, leaving the tab alone for ten minutes, reading it for ten minutes, then closing it.
But it doesn't take 50 kB of JS to be able to do that!
- onion2k 6y agoYou can't tell if I load a page and then walk away and spend 5 minutes making a cup of tea, and then come back and close the tab without looking at it either. Even with JS. Assuming that having a tab active and focused means a person is engaged with the page is false. Also, believing a page is better because I spend 10 minutes on it rather than 5 is nonsensical. Am I reading everything (good) or am I hunting around for some piece content and not finding it (bad)? Time on page is a stupid metric that doesn't measure anything useful.
- duckmysick 6y agoYou can measure scroll depth and cursor activity. It gives you clues how the user interacted with the page.
- twic 6y agoYou can measure scrolling and mouse movement and so on, which gives you clues as to whether someone is actually reading. It's not like this data gives you an immediate and perfect readout of the user's entire brain, but it's not useless either.
- onion2k 6y agoAnd that's when things get seriously invasive and people start saying "Why are you using a 26kb tracking script?" If you collect information about how often a user is moving their mouse and scrolling the page in order to tell how long someone has been on a page then you've moved from collecting what's useful to collecting everything you can just in case it's useful. That decision comes at the cost of invading everyone's privacy, and that needs to stop.