I'm Olivia with Whole Whale, and if you're like me there is only one thing you want
to know when it comes to your website— how deep is your love? Or, at the very
least, interest... We're going to look at how to do that by setting up a scroll
depth tracker in Google Tag Manager. Okay, but what exactly is a scroll depth
tracker? And what is Google Tag Manager? Google Tag Manager basically functions
as the next level of your Google Analytics. Google Analytics is great for
understanding, at a very top level value, how people are engaging with your site.
Google Tag Manager allows you to go one step deeper with that—it's basically
like upgrading from window units for your air conditioning, to central air. Let's
talk about the scroll depth tracker. On average, only 20% of web pages are read.
This is very scary if you're working in content strategy, right? So let's see how
your site measures up against the average. You can set up different ways of
tracking scrolled depth—you can say that you want Google Tag Manager to fire off
an event every time someone gets to 75%, 90%, you may even want to see how many
people are getting to 50%. Let's look at how to set all of those up. So once
you're logged into your Google Tag Manager account, you can click on "Tags"
and "New" and name this tag (I recommend and scroll depth tracking). We can
also set it up so that it's going specifically on our "Tips" page. We're
going to go with Universal Analytics for tag
configuration, tracking this as an event. Tor category for scroll depth we will
enter "scroll depth!" For action, we're going to enter two open brackets and "scroll
depth threshold," click on that once it appears in your list. Same with label—two
open brackets, click on "page path." And then, pay attention to the non
interaction hit. So in Google Analytics, they will not automatically count
scroll depth tracking as getting to a certain interaction on the site, so we
want to make sure that GA knows that once a person gets to about 50% of the
way down a page on our site, that that counts as meaningful interaction. We can
set that to "true" if we don't want it to count as interaction, but we do want this
to count so that it gives us a truer sense of bounce rate. We're going to make
sure our settings variable template isn't used, and then we're gonna go ahead
and choose our trigger. We already have one configured for scroll depth but if
we were starting this from scratch, we would go and enter in a new trigger,
click on scroll depth under user engagement, and then we can
enter in the percentages. So here we have it configured to check at 50, 75, and 90
percent of the page, and we can also have it apply specifically to certain pages.
So we really want to see on Whole Whale's site how this plays against the pages
that we our resources on, which includes the URL
slug "/tips," so I'm going to save both that trigger and that tag, and then go into
preview mode to make sure that this is actually working as we intend for it to,
because man plans or woman plans and Google laughs. So I'm going to go first onto
the Whole Whale "Tips" page once I've entered preview mode, and we can see here
for instance that the score depth tag on "Tips" is there and not firing, so I'm just
gonna keep scrolling down this page until I get to what I imagined to be
about halfway through, we can see that that tag fired as well as our other tag
on scroll depth. And then I'm going to pick a piece, let's look at our
"Giving Tuesday Predictions for 2018," right around the corner, and we're going to
wait for Google Tag Manager preview mode to load again. And we're going to once
again keep scrolling until we see this tag fire, and from there we
can go back into Google Tag Manager and set this to go live. So how is your site
doing? If you want to take it to the next level, you can start A/B testing your
pages to see what can entice users to move just a little bit further down.
With multiple squirrel depth trackers, see if you're losing people more between
halfway and three-quarters of the way down the page, or three-quarters of the
way and nine-tenths of the way down the page. I'm Olivia with Whole Whale, we also
have a whole bunch of knowledge when it comes to content strategy and getting
users to scroll that much further down the page and that is in our Content and
SEO course on Whole Whale University. You can access that at www.wholewhale.com/university,
and you can even access it with a discount code 'WWVIDEO.'
How awesome is that? Stay tuned, and see you soon!