Tutorial on Metrics of User Engagement: Applications to News, Search and E-Commerce

Abstract

User engagement plays a central role in companies operating online services, such as search engines, news portals, e-commerce sites, and social networks. A main challenge is to leverage collected knowledge about the daily online behavior of millions of users to understand what engage them short-term and more importantly long-term. The most common way that engagement is measured is through various online metrics, acting as proxy measures of user engagement. This tutorial will review these metrics, their advantages and drawbacks, and their appropriateness to various types of online services. As case studies, we will focus on three types of services, news, search and e-commerce. We will also briefly discuss how to develop better machine learning models to optimize online metrics, and design experiments to test these models.