Interaction

An interaction is any active user action on a page — a click, scroll, keystroke, tap or purposeful movement — showing the user is not a passive onlooker.

An interaction is the line that separates presence from engagement: opening a page is not yet an interaction, but the first scroll or click is. Its importance is that nearly every engagement-quality metric is built on the definition of interaction — engaged session, engagement rate and engaged minutes all depend on which action we count as an interaction. And there lies the subtlety: too loose a definition (any tiny mouse move) makes almost every session engaged and the metric worthless; too strict and real engagement is under-reported. Its opposite is the non-interaction event: an event that fires automatically without a user action and should not count toward the engagement rate. So every time you see an engagement rate, the first question is what its interaction is defined as.