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Traffic counts arrivals. Engagement counts attention.

How far people read, how long they were genuinely there, and how many days they came back. Collected automatically, with every denominator stated instead of quietly chosen to flatter.

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What are engagement metrics?

Engagement metrics measure involvement rather than arrival: how far down a page a visitor read, how long they spent actually paying attention to it, and how many separate days they came back. They are the numbers that separate a page which gets traffic from a page which does something with it.

They are also the numbers most easily faked. Time on page that counts a backgrounded tab, and scroll depth that counts a page which fit on screen, both produce healthy-looking charts that describe nothing. The definitions matter more than the dashboard.

Scroll depth, per page.

For each page, Mrkr shows what share of pageviews reached 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%, plus an average depth. It is measured by how far the bottom of the viewport travelled through the document, so somebody who saw a whole short page without scrolling is not recorded as having scrolled.

The denominator is pageviews that reported a threshold at all, not every pageview. Pages with less than 240px below the fold report nothing on purpose, and thresholds already visible on load are marked silently rather than fired as an event.

Mrkr engagement view showing scroll depth and time on page.
Stickiness above, per-page scroll depth below, both on the same filters as everything else. Open it in the live demo.
scroll thresholds: 25, 50, 75 and 100 percent
4
scroll thresholds: 25, 50, 75 and 100 percent
of no interaction before engaged time stops accumulating
30s
of no interaction before engaged time stops accumulating
of content below the fold before a page is tracked for scroll at all
240px
of content below the fold before a page is tracked for scroll at all
minimum engaged time before anything is reported
1s
minimum engaged time before anything is reported

Geometry is re-measured on every pageview, every client-side route change, and on a debounced window resize, so rotating a phone mid-visit does not misfire a threshold against a stale measurement. None of these reports are metered: billing counts pageviews only.

What each number actually counts.

The definitions, written out, because every one of these is measured differently by different tools and the differences are large enough to change a decision.

MetricDefinition in MrkrDenominator
Engaged timeAccumulates only while the tab is visible and there has been an interaction in the last 30 secondsPageviews that reported over one second
Scroll depthHow far the bottom of the viewport travelled through the document, at four thresholdsPageviews that reported any threshold, not all pageviews
StickinessDistinct calendar days a visitor was active within the rangeAll visitors active in the range
Returning shareVisitors active on more than one day, as a share of all visitorsAll visitors active in the range
Bounce rateSessions with a single pageview, available broken down by sourceSessions in the range

Stickiness and returning share need cookie mode to be meaningful. In the default cookieless mode the visitor identifier rotates every 24 hours, so nobody can be observed on two days.

What engagement is good for.

Telling skimming from stalling

Most people stopping at 50% is a middle that loses them. Everyone hitting 100% in eight seconds is a skim.

Judging long-form honestly

A 3,000-word page with a 40-second average engaged time was not read. Useful to know before commissioning ten more.

Finding the section that loses people

A consistent cliff between 50% and 75% across several pages usually points at a shared component in the same place.

Backing a conversion hypothesis

If converters read twice as far as everyone else, getting people to scroll is the lever, not rewriting the headline.

Open the engagement view

The live demo has stickiness and per-page scroll depth on real demo traffic. No signup, no card.

Open the live demo
Mrkr engagement view showing scroll depth and time on page.

Where these numbers get misused.

Time on page is not engaged time

Most tools time the gap between two pageviews, so a tab left open over lunch is a two-hour visit. Mrkr counts presence only.

Scroll depth is not a quality score

A reference page that answers in the first paragraph should score low. Compare against its own history, not a site average.

A missing scroll row is information

A page with no scroll data is a page that fits on screen. Reading it as 0% is the commonest misinterpretation here.

Bots would flatten all of it

Automated traffic neither scrolls nor pauses, so unfiltered engagement is dragged towards zero. Bots are filtered at ingest.

Questions, answered.

Keep reading

Your first visitor is already here.

Drop in the script and watch them land. It takes about a minute.

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