June 6, 2023 If you’re already using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) you undoubtedly know it includes, among other things, a default built-in scroll tracking. The GA4's default scroll event activates when a user has scrolled through approximately 90% of the page and that’s it. However, analyzing user behaviour at 50% or even 25% can reveal valuable data on content consumption. For example, some websites have an Up Button that when clicked, takes the user all the way to the top of the page. By having the 25%, 50%, and/or 75% data mapped to the Up Button event, you would gain an understanding of where users stop reading your content.
In this case, if you have a promotion banner close to the bottom of your site, it will likely not have a lot of interactions. By optimizing accordingly, you can enhance the user experience, improve your website content and drive better results.
The first step is to disable the default scroll tracking from the Enhanced Measurement stream. The reason we’re doing this is to avoid duplicate tracking of the Scroll Event since we’re going to implement it manually.
From this point, you no longer have the default Scroll event tracking. The next step is to configure the new Scroll event.
At this point you’ll need to access Google Tag Manager (GTM). Don’t worry as this solution is “code-free” and you won’t need the help of a developer or touch the website code. GTM has everything you need to get this up and running.
Quick tip 2: Keep an eye out for the event name. If you had the Enhancement Measurement scroll activated before and collected some events, you will likely see that data in the new scroll event you created. For example, the 90%. The reason for that is due to the same event name: Scroll. GA4 will aggregate everything under the same location. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s good to know in case you see this in the reports.
9. Choose the Custom Scroll trigger.
Now that you have scroll depth tracking setup, you’ll probably want to set up a report. Follow the directions below to do this in Explorations. Note, if you use Looker you can also create a dashboard that shows the articles with scroll depth, but for today, let’s focus on Explorations.
At the 24 hrmark you should be able to see the newly created event data in GA4 reports. Your first stop would be Reports > Engagement > Events > Scroll. Here you will be able to see the number of events and the Scroll Depth in one of the cards below.
Another option is the Exploration report which would give you unsampled data.
Build the report using this screenshot as an example:
It’s also a good idea to set conversions based on scroll depth, but we’ll leave that for another day.
Scroll depth tracking is a great feature included by default in GA4. However, the default only tracks when someone scrolls below the 90% mark of the page height. If you want to track other thresholds for example 25% or 75% you have to customize it. Once you start collecting this data it’s a creative source for improving your site’s user experience.
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Have questions about transitioning or getting the most out of your GA4 implementation? Contact us.