Measuring Page Scroll in Convert Experiences

THIS ARTICLE WILL HELP YOU:

• How much of your page are visitors really reading?
• Why should I care if people are scrolling or reading my content?
• Complementing Your Heat Mapping/Mouse Tracking tools
• Implementing the Page Scroll Goal Template

How much of your page are visitors really reading?

If you are a publisher, a media site owner, or a content manager, you probably want to know how people interact with your content. Are they reading the full article or are they just reading the headlines and bouncing? Did the intro paragraph engage them enough to read the whole article or did it turn them off? Even for eCommerce and B2B sites, you should certainly be interested in your landing page performance and how engaging your copy is. Are visitors seeing your marketing assets or are your calls-to-action not event getting noticed?

Why should I care if people are scrolling or reading my content?

Generally, if visitors are not scrolling down your pages, it’s probably a good signal that your content is of no interest to them.

If your business model relies on engaging your audience with great content, such as a publisher or a media site, you could save time and maybe money by focusing your content writers’ efforts on what is getting traction. Knowing what keeps users engaged will help you refocus your content development plan and content marketing strategy (and get rid of what doesn’t interest your audience).

If you’re selling a product and all the persuasive "sales" points (or worse, your call-to-actions or conversion buttons) are below the fold and aren’t being read, your conversion rates and bottom lines are going to hurt.

The above is also very applicable to government sites. Analytics professionals at federal agencies can leverage insights from content analysis to inform content marketing and optimization strategies for the agencies.

Complementing Your Heat Mapping/Mouse Tracking tools

You could always use cool heat mapping tools like Crazy Egg (scrollmap feature) or ClickTales scroll reach heatmaps, to see which areas of the page are getting the most attention and what links are being clicked. But maybe your are in a hurry and don’t have the time or the budget to acquire a new tool (and you really like to stitch the "scroll" data nicely with the rest of your Convert Experience reports). When you have the data in one place, it is easier to create segments and see how scroll impacts conversion, engagement and other on-site behaviors.

Implementing the Page Scroll Goal Template

The scroll percentage goal allows you to set up a goal based on how far your visitors scroll down the page ("scroll depth"). You can configure this goal to be triggered based on 25 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent or more of the page read. The easy user interface allows you to set up scroll depth goals without coding.

Go to the Goals overview page (or to Experience Summary) and select "Add Goal". From the Goal templates, select the Scroll Percentage Goal:

Add a name for your goal, the percentage you want to measure (e.g. 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of page scroll), and the Page URL to which you want this goal applied: