Google Tag Manager 101 Part 10 - Scroll Tracking

01/12/2017

Ever wondered if your users are actually scrolling down the home page far enough to click on that key Call to Action tile? You're getting traffic to your blog but are they actually reading the whole article? Wonder no longer ....

Hot on the heels of Google Tag Manager video tracking is another new feature that is easy to set up. You already had the ability to track the time that people stayed on a page (see GTM 101 Part 6) but you didn't know if they actually looked at the whole article or just forgot to close the tab.

Scroll tracking is very useful for your home page, if it is a long and busy page - now you can see how many people actually reach each section. For single page websites this is absolutely crucial - you can send a virtual page view for certain scroll points to indicate that a section of your home page has been reached. 

There were already Google Tag Manager scroll depth tracking solutions online but they required Javascript knowledge, possibly a developer and some time to configure. Now Google Tag Manager enables you to set up scroll tracking within a few minutes. Here's how.

1. Add the 3 Scroll Depth variables as shown.

2. Create a trigger and set the scroll depths at which you want the trigger to fire.

3. Build a tag to send through each event to Google Analytics.

A word of caution. If you track 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% scroll depth, you will trigger 25% and possibly 50% when the page is first loaded on short pages. To make the statistics meaningful, limit your use of scroll tracking to longer pages and set the higher percentage to a value that indicates completion of the article - you can test this by viewing the article in GTM Preview mode and scrolling down to see when your tags fire.

Written by Nick Baker