Understood. Other services do accurately measure this however. ChartBeat[1] tries to differentiate between users who are reading, writing and so on. Re: your ex

Understood. Other services do accurately measure this however. ChartBeat[1] tries to differentiate between users who are reading, writing and so on. Re: your example, it does literally keep track of how far you scrolled as well. Unfortunately, my personal website is not their target market. Plans start at $9.95 per month: infinitely more than my hosting cost and also overkill for whenever I'm not front paged. It'd only really make sense for me if it had pricing based on usage, which I can almost guarantee they'll never launch. I'd argue that Google Analytics is vague in defining or explaining their terms. In a perfect world, yes, they'd offer "pings" to see if a user is active, but even without that I'd at least hope they clarify their terms. Misunderstood terms lead to misunderstood statistics. The less misunderstood statistics, the better. [1]: https://chartbeat.com/ https://chartbeat.com/