Page and screen engagement

Activity or engagement tracking enables you to measure the time a user spent engaged on a page or screen, and the extent of the page or screen they viewed.

Snowplow provides implementations for web and mobile platforms:

Page ping events on web
Screen summary entity on mobile

Both page and screen activity tracking are included in the Snowplow Unified Digital package to calculate engagement metrics. The legacy Web package handles page pings as well.

Page engagement

Page ping events record users engaging with content on a web page after it has initially loaded. This includes scroll position.

Where activity autotracking is available, you can configure your tracker to send page ping events at regular intervals. They're considered a type of "heartbeat" event that indicates the user is still present and engaging with the page.

Page ping events are baked-in events that have no schema. They populate the page offset atomic event parameters.

This table shows the support for page ping tracking across the main client-side Snowplow tracker SDKs. Python is the only server-side tracker that provides page ping events.

Tracker	Supported	Since version	Auto-tracking	Notes
Web	✅	0.10.0	✅
iOS	❌
Android	❌
React Native	❌
Flutter	✅	0.1.0	✅	Only on web
Roku	❌
Python	✅	0.8.0	❌	Detect activity and track manually
Google Tag Manager	✅	v3	✅

We recommend using the Base web tracking plan template for web tracking. It includes page pings.

Screen engagement

Use screen engagement tracking on mobile to track a screen_end event when a user navigates away from a screen.

The trackers can also track a screen_summary entity that contains screen engagement data. This entity is sent along with lifecycle and screen_end events.

This table shows the support for screen engagement tracking across the main client-side Snowplow tracker SDKs. The server-side trackers don't include screen engagement tracking.

Tracker	Supported	Since version	Auto-tracking	Notes
Web	❌
iOS	✅	6.0.0	✅
Android	✅	6.0.0	✅
React Native	✅	2.1.0	✅	Only on mobile
Flutter	✅	0.1.0	✅	Only on mobile
Roku	❌
Google Tag Manager	❌

We recommend using the Base mobile tracking plan template for mobile tracking. It includes screen end events.

Screen end event

This event can be tracked automatically by the mobile trackers just before the transition to the next screen. It has no properties.

screen_end

Event

Schema for an event tracked before transitioning to a new screen

Schema URIiglu:com.snowplowanalytics.mobile/screen_end/jsonschema/1-0-0

Properties and schema

Table
JSON schema

This schema has no properties.

json
{
  "description": "Schema for an event tracked before transitioning to a new screen",
  "properties": {},
  "additionalProperties": false,
  "type": "object",
  "self": {
    "vendor": "com.snowplowanalytics.mobile",
    "name": "screen_end",
    "format": "jsonschema",
    "version": "1-0-0"
  },
  "$schema": "http://iglucentral.com/schemas/com.snowplowanalytics.self-desc/schema/jsonschema/1-0-0#"
}

Warehouse query

Snowflake
BigQuery
Databricks
Redshift & Postgres

sql
select
unstruct_event_com_snowplowanalytics_mobile_screen_end_1 screen_end_1
from
atomic.events
where
events.collector_tstamp > getdate() - interval '1 hour'
and events.event = 'unstruct'
and events.event_name = 'screen_end'
and events.event_vendor = 'com.snowplowanalytics.mobile'

sql
select
unstruct_event_com_snowplowanalytics_mobile_screen_end_1_0_0
from
PIPELINE_NAME.events events
where
events.collector_tstamp > timestamp_sub(current_timestamp(), interval 1 hour)
and events.event = 'unstruct'
and events.event_name = 'screen_end'
and events.event_vendor = 'com.snowplowanalytics.mobile'

sql
select
unstruct_event_com_snowplowanalytics_mobile_screen_end_1
from
atomic.events events
where
events.collector_tstamp > timestampadd(HOUR, -1, current_timestamp())
and events.event = 'unstruct'
and events.event_name = 'screen_end'
and events.event_vendor = 'com.snowplowanalytics.mobile'
and unstruct_event_com_snowplowanalytics_mobile_screen_end_1 is not null

sql
select
"screen_end_1".*
from
atomic.events events
join atomic.com_snowplowanalytics_mobile_screen_end_1 "screen_end_1"
  on "screen_end_1".root_id = events.event_id and "screen_end_1".root_tstamp = events.collector_tstamp
where
events.collector_tstamp > getdate() - interval '1 hour'
and "screen_end_1".root_tstamp > getdate() - interval '1 hour'
and events.event = 'unstruct'
and events.event_name = 'screen_end'
and events.event_vendor = 'com.snowplowanalytics.mobile'

Screen summary entity

Entity that contains screen engagement information, including how long a user spends on a screen in the foreground and background, as well as scroll depth.

screen_summary

Entity

Schema for an entity tracked with foreground/background/screen_end events with summary statistics about the screen view

Schema URIiglu:com.snowplowanalytics.mobile/screen_summary/jsonschema/1-0-0

Example

json
{
  "foreground_sec": 10.2,
  "background_sec": 3.1,
  "last_item_index": 11,
  "items_count": 50,
  "min_x_offset": 0,
  "max_x_offset": 400,
  "min_y_offset": 0,
  "max_y_offset": 1000,
  "content_width": 400,
  "content_height": 5000
}

Properties and schema

Table
JSON schema

Property	Description
`foreground_sec` number	Required. Time in seconds spent on the current screen while the app was in foreground
`background_sec` number	Optional. Time in seconds spent on the current screen while the app was in background
`last_item_index` integer	Optional. Index of the last viewed item in the list on the screen
`items_count` integer	Optional. Total number of items in the list on the screen
`min_x_offset` integer	Optional. Minimum horizontal scroll offset on the scroll view in pixels
`max_x_offset` integer	Optional. Maximum horizontal scroll offset on the scroll view in pixels
`min_y_offset` integer	Optional. Minimum vertical scroll offset on the scroll view in pixels
`max_y_offset` integer	Optional. Maximum vertical scroll offset on the scroll view in pixels
`content_width` integer	Optional. Width of the scroll view in pixels
`content_height` integer	Optional. Height of the scroll view in pixels

json
{
  "description": "Schema for an entity tracked with foreground/background/screen_end events with summary statistics about the screen view",
  "properties": {
    "foreground_sec": {
      "type": "number",
      "description": "Time in seconds spent on the current screen while the app was in foreground",
      "minimum": 0,
      "maximum": 2147483647
    },
    "background_sec": {
      "type": [
        "number",
        "null"
      ],
      "description": "Time in seconds spent on the current screen while the app was in background",
      "minimum": 0,
      "maximum": 2147483647
    },
    "last_item_index": {
      "type": [
        "integer",
        "null"
      ],
      "description": "Index of the last viewed item in the list on the screen",
      "minimum": 0,
      "maximum": 65535
    },
    "items_count": {
      "type": [
        "integer",
        "null"
      ],
      "description": "Total number of items in the list on the screen",
      "minimum": 0,
      "maximum": 65535
    },
    "min_x_offset": {
      "type": [
        "integer",
        "null"
      ],
      "description": "Minimum horizontal scroll offset on the scroll view in pixels",
      "minimum": -2147483647,
      "maximum": 2147483647
    },
    "max_x_offset": {
      "type": [
        "integer",
        "null"
      ],
      "description": "Maximum horizontal scroll offset on the scroll view in pixels",
      "minimum": -2147483647,
      "maximum": 2147483647
    },
    "min_y_offset": {
      "type": [
        "integer",
        "null"
      ],
      "description": "Minimum vertical scroll offset on the scroll view in pixels",
      "minimum": -2147483647,
      "maximum": 2147483647
    },
    "max_y_offset": {
      "type": [
        "integer",
        "null"
      ],
      "description": "Maximum vertical scroll offset on the scroll view in pixels",
      "minimum": -2147483647,
      "maximum": 2147483647
    },
    "content_width": {
      "type": [
        "integer",
        "null"
      ],
      "description": "Width of the scroll view in pixels",
      "minimum": 0,
      "maximum": 2147483647
    },
    "content_height": {
      "type": [
        "integer",
        "null"
      ],
      "description": "Height of the scroll view in pixels",
      "minimum": 0,
      "maximum": 2147483647
    }
  },
  "additionalProperties": false,
  "type": "object",
  "required": [
    "foreground_sec"
  ],
  "self": {
    "vendor": "com.snowplowanalytics.mobile",
    "name": "screen_summary",
    "format": "jsonschema",
    "version": "1-0-0"
  },
  "$schema": "http://iglucentral.com/schemas/com.snowplowanalytics.self-desc/schema/jsonschema/1-0-0#"
}

Page engagement​

Screen engagement​

Screen end event​