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Is dwell time a meaningful/valuable metric to track? I consistently open links in tabs I keep open for a long time and I suspect other people might do the same.

Is dwell time a meaningful/valuable metric to track? I consistently open links in tabs I keep open for a long time and I suspect other people might do the same. Like you said, it's really hard to interpret this data, so why bother trying? I think you're right about the ease of adoption aspect. My take is that we do it because we've always done it - primarily because the cost/benefit ratio has justified it. We've normalized the idea that it's not only acceptable but also prudent to study and analyze the detailed behavior of end-users. The consensus seems to be that not adding end-user tracking is similar to "leaving money on the table". On reflection, I'm starting to feel that it's perhaps not an acceptable set of norms to accept without a justified need. Some metrics seem almost voyeuristic and most imply an approach to content marketing that only snake-oil salesmen should consider. The use of analytics itself implies a certain potential for inauthentic or intentionally manipulative content. Optimizing content to have as much mass-appeal as possible is perhaps more problematic than we initially thought. Maybe it's time we rethink the norm in the first place. Perhaps it's better to not know everything.

hansvm 5y ago
> Is dwell time a meaningful/valuable metric to track? Like most other questions of this nature, the answer is "maybe." Throwing out one possible scenario: We know some people keep tabs open for a long time. Does our dwell time data reflect that? If not then that's a red flag that we have work to do (maybe a memory leak from some framework lifecycle issue makes our page prone to crashes or being manually closed, maybe the content is such hot garbage that nobody thinks it's worth even keeping a background tab open with our site, ...). > Like you said, it's really hard to interpret this data, so why bother trying? Something can have a lot of value without that value being easy to extract. Like...I'm sure Amazon has detailed metrics about every mouse and keyboard event associated with any pixel with the gall to glance sideways at the shopping cart. It's probably hard to use correctly, but when a 1% increase can pay for hundreds or thousands of dedicated engineers and scientists the ease of interpretation starts to not matter as much. > I'm starting to feel that it's perhaps not an acceptable set of norms to accept without a justified need I'll need to think on it further, but on the surface that seems like a reasonable baseline. If you don't at a bare minimum know enough about your business and the data in question to be able to anticipate some actionable way you might actually need the data you want to collect then you'll probably do more harm than good for yourself and your users by collecting it.

hansvm 5y ago

> Is dwell time a meaningful/valuable metric to track? Like most other questions of this nature, the answer is "maybe." Throwing out one possible scenario: We know some people keep tabs open for a long time. Does our dwell time data reflect that? If not then that's a red flag that we have work to do (maybe a memory leak from some framework lifecycle issue makes our page prone to crashes or being manually closed, maybe the content is such hot garbage that nobody thinks it's worth even keeping a background tab open with our site, ...). > Like you said, it's really hard to interpret this data, so why bother trying? Something can have a lot of value without that value being easy to extract. Like...I'm sure Amazon has detailed metrics about every mouse and keyboard event associated with any pixel with the gall to glance sideways at the shopping cart. It's probably hard to use correctly, but when a 1% increase can pay for hundreds or thousands of dedicated engineers and scientists the ease of interpretation starts to not matter as much. > I'm starting to feel that it's perhaps not an acceptable set of norms to accept without a justified need I'll need to think on it further, but on the surface that seems like a reasonable baseline. If you don't at a bare minimum know enough about your business and the data in question to be able to anticipate some actionable way you might actually need the data you want to collect then you'll probably do more harm than good for yourself and your users by collecting it.