Are you unable to understand why bounce rate is so high on your website? Do you have a content website and users or single page applications and wondering whether your users are consuming the content or not? Have your team created a page as such where major information/ CTAs or form is on second fold of page and you are debating with your team that since it is on second fold, people are not looking at that information?
If answer to any of the question is a “Yes” then you must have scroll depth tracking enabled on your website. Scroll depth tracking in google analytics, adobe analytics or any other web analytics is one of those things that is quite simple and you must have, especially if you have a content-heavy site or single page application. With the help of tracking the scroll depth, you will not only get an idea of how much users are consuming your content, but it would also help you to turn meaningless metrics such as Bounce Rate, Average Session Duration into something far more useful.
The scroll depth is measured in percentage or pixels and you can configure it for both i.e. vertical scroll and horizontal scroll depending in your requirements. Just to give you an idea:
If value of vertical scroll depth is 25% then it means top 25% of the page scrolled by the user vertically and from top to bottom.
If value of vertical scroll depth is 50% then it means top 50% of the page scrolled by the user vertically and from top to bottom.
If value of vertical scroll depth is 75% then it means top 75% of the page scrolled by the user vertically and from top to bottom.
If value of vertical scroll depth is 100% then it means the user has scrolled complete page.
Generally, analysts prefer to put 90% rather than 100% as website visitors usually do not scroll 100% of a page and hence analysts consider 90% scroll depth as reaching the bottom of a web page. Please note that these scrolling percentages are very customizable and you can put any other percentage as per your requirement like 30, 60, 90.
If you are using Google Tag Manager, scroll tracking can be done in few simple steps as GTM offers built in triggers and variables that makes implementing scroll depth tracking like a Layman’s job.
Implement Scroll Tracking with Google Tag Manager:
- Enable the built-in scroll depth threshold variable if it is not done already.
- Go to Variable screen in Google Tag Manager and select configure to enable built-in variables. Scroll down in variables panels and check the “Scroll Depth threshold” variable
- Now navigate to “Triggers” clicking the “New” button for creating new trigger and selecting the “Scroll Depth” trigger template from the list
- Once selected, you will see the following configurable options:
- Vertical Scroll Depths- to set the trigger for tracking vertical scroll depth
- Horizontal Scroll Depths- to set the trigger for tracking horizontal vertical depth
And, inside these options you will have the option to configure the percentage or pixels to track scroll depth
- Pages- All pages/some pages- enable the trigger either on all pages or only select few pages
- Now, your trigger is all set up. Next step is to create a tag to send scroll events to Google Analytics
- Create a new universal analytics event tag
- Enter values in event category, action and label and as per your requirement. You can put the variable that we have created i.e. “scroll depth percentage” in event label or value as per the requirement. This scroll depth percentage will return an integer such as 25, 50,75, 100. So, you can append “%” after the variable to make it more meaningful.
Below is one example for the scroll tracking tag which fires on each 25% of page scrolled:
If you observe closely, we have set “Non Interaction Hit” as True this is because we do not want the scrolling of a user to impact our bounce rate. This means even if user exit from website just after scrolling the page, we would like to still consider that user as a bounced one. However, you can set it “False” as per your requirements.
If you have any questions or something interesting to share with us related to scroll tracking, let us know in comments below.