Scroll-Tracking 101: Optimizing Content Marketing for Engagement

Making convincing arguments in the 21st century amounts to how much data you have and how well you can work with it. With Google Analytics, you get heaps of data but how do you find your way around getting to the most relevant bits, especially when you want to use the data to improve content marketing?

When your aim is to market and promote content, it’s often difficult to rely solely on the usual metrics like pageviews. For one, if a user’s browser window looks like the one below and it mostly does, you know the page-views data you have can’t be used as a standalone measure to see which content is doing well.

so many tabs, so little time…

How do you know if the users actually engaged with the content? Did they read it? Or were all your content marketing efforts for nothing?

Just short of sitting with every user as they give your post a read, there are a few proxies that can be used for estimating engagement better. One of the easiest proxies to use and understand is scroll tracking. Scroll tracking, as the name suggests, takes into consideration the number of people scrolling down a page to measure engagement.

The Case for Scroll Tracking as a Measure of Content Engagement

Scroll Tracking gives us a trove of data to address some of the questions every (serious) content writer and marketer has ever wondered about:

• Where is the page losing the users?
• What is making the users leave the page or “drop-off”?
• Is your CTA optimally placed? If people only read 50% of your page, having a CTA at the footer will mean your potential audience will never get to it.

Which type of content resonates with your audience? Do certain topics keep users more engaged than others?

The good thing about scroll-tracking is that not only does it track how many people scroll through a page but also the time they choose to spend on it.

What exactly does a Scroll Tracking Report do?

The good thing about scroll-tracking is that not only does it track how many people scroll through a page but also the time they choose to spend on it. It does this by sending data to Google Analytics after every 25% of the page is scrolled along with the time it took the user to get to that point.

Getting Started: Setting up Scroll Tracking

The easiest way to setup scroll tracking on your website is to make use of the Google Tag Manager (GTM) Custom HTML tag. I recommend this great bit of code to implement it with. With this, one can also track when specific elements on the page are scrolled into view.

Understanding the data

Once scroll tracking is set up, the real fun begins! We can now use custom report to understand data generated by scroll tracking.

To do this, I use thisScroll Tracking Report. It contains page title as the main dimension along with total and unique events to show count for the number of times a page was scrolled.

This is a drill down report which means you can click through page links to further explore data for particular pages.

Once you click on any page title, the report will modify report to show scroll distances detail for that particular page.

Above, you can see different scroll events for particular pages along with how often people are getting to that point.

Understanding time spent

Using the scroll tracking data, we can also see how much time users are spending on individual content pages. For that, you will need to create the scroll tracking timing report. This report works similarly to the one above but shows how much time people spend getting to each step.

10 interesting questions to ask of your scroll data

All the setup and custom reports are good but they are really only as useful as the intelligent insights you can glean from them. Here are a few talking points to get started.

Understand Promotional Channels

1. What marketing channels and audiences are more engaged? What segment of traffic spends the most amount of time?
2. What type of users are converting?
   Are people who read over 75% of the blog converting more than the others do they come from a source?
3. What time of the day is your user most engaged with the content? Promoting them during these hours can result in a more attentive audience. Bonus: Segment this by marketing channel!

Understand Content — Audience Fit

1. Which type of content is keeping users more engaged?
   If your blog article has video or other interactive content in the beginning, are users reading beyond that or just leaving after watching the video?
2. Where is a good place to put call to actions or trigger newsletter popups
   Hint: Its generally higher than you think!
3. Do different sections of the website generate different user engagement? Are people more engaged with a specific paragraph, video or activity?
4. What writing styles interest your readers the most?
   This will help you determine which authors receive the highest value of scrolls.
5. At which part of the blog are you losing the highest number of users?
   This may indicate an issue with a certain topic or tell you a common trend about length of content.
6. What is causing the users to leave? Read the content, identify potential areas that might have led to user losing interest and leaving.
7. Is the content too long? Does your writing style need to change? Would the article be more reader-friendly if it has multimedia?

Not all of these questions are relevant for every content site but this is my big list of questions to get me in the zone to improve truly improve my content marketing efforts.

Do let me know what you think after you have given it a shot! I’d love to hear your questions and insights. Happy Insights!

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