While the term “engagement” has many definitions depending on what the metric is trying to measure, in Google Analytics, the definition of engagement is quite simple:
- It measures how much time a group of visitors spend on a site (Visit Duration) OR
- It measures the depth of pages visited while on the site by a group of visitors (Page Depth)
This report can be useful if you would like to review a predetermined set of parameters for what defines engagement for your site, but lacks the ability to customize beyond the pre-set ranges.
Visit Duration
When you look at the visit duration report, you will notice a set of ranges that shows how long visitors spend on your site. These are grouped to less than 10 seconds (i.e. a bounced visitor), up to 30 seconds, less than a minute, 1-3 minutes, 3-10 minutes, 10-30 minutes and more than 30 minutes.
Page Depth
The page depth report shows a distribution of how many pages a visitor traverses as they view your site. The ranges
Limitations of the Google Analytics Engagement Report
I consider these reports to be “legacy” reports, because there is not a lot of advanced analysis that you can do with the information provided. While you can apply advanced segments to the report to view the engagement of segments of your website visitors, you cannot apply secondary dimensions, review goals, e-commerce, etc. as it applies to this report.
