Engaged Minutes
IntermediateEngaged minutes is the total time a visitor actively worked with a page, counting only the intervals in which activity such as scrolling, pointer movement or typing was detected.
The measurement is heartbeat based: at fixed intervals the tool checks that the tab is in the foreground and that the last interaction was more recent than a short idle threshold, and only then adds to the counter. That is the key difference from time on page, which is derived from the gap between two pageviews and happily counts an abandoned tab, whereas engaged minutes excludes it. The common mistake is comparing the figure against another publisher's: because the idle threshold and heartbeat interval differ per tool, the metric is only comparable inside one implementation.
How it is calculated
Engaged minutes = sum of the heartbeat intervals in which the page was in the foreground and the visitor was active
Each interval is typically five to fifteen seconds and is counted only when the time since the last interaction is below the idle threshold. The unit is minutes, and because the value depends on that threshold, changing it makes the metric's history inconsistent.