Webpage Depth-level Dwell Time Prediction

The amount of time spent by users at specific page depths within webpages, called dwell time, can be used by web publishers to decide where to place online ads and what type of ads to place at different depths within a webpage. This paper presents a model to predict the dwell time for a given "user, webpage, depth" triplet based on historic data collected by publishers. Dwell time prediction is difficult due to user behavior variability and data sparsity. We adopt the Factorization Machines model because it is able to capture the interaction between users and webpages, overcome the data sparsity issue, and provide flexibility to add auxiliary information such as the visible area of a user's browser. Experimental results using data from a large web publisher demonstrate that our model outperforms deterministic and regression-based comparison models.