Measuring Inter-site Engagement in a Network of Sites

Abstract User engagement is a key concept in the design of websites, motivated by the observation that successful websites are not just used, but are engaged with. Engagement metrics enable us to perform large-scale web analytic studies to understand how users engage with a website. Many large online providers (e.g., AOL, Google, Yahoo) offer a variety of websites, ranging from shopping to news. Standard engagement metrics are not able to assess engagement with more than one website, as they do not account for the user traffic between websites. We therefore propose a methodology for studying inter-site engagement by modeling websites (nodes) and user traffic (edges) between them as a network. Our methodology reduces the complexity of the data, and hence metrics can be efficiently employed to study user engagement within such networks. The value of our approach was demonstrated on 228 websites offered by Yahoo and a sample of 661M online sessions.

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