How to track user scroll depth? 2023

As a website owner you are always looking for ways to see what is working and what your audience is most interested in. One of the best ways of doing this is through a little known technique called Scroll Tracking and in this tutorial we are going to show you two methods to implement this strategy in as little as 5 minutes.

But what is scroll tracking and why use it?

Scroll tracking allows you to see how far your website user scrolls on any given page. Being able to see if a particular page only gets scrolled 25,50, 75 or 100% is great data for improving that particular page but also for making general redesign decisions if you see a trend among your pages or blog posts.

This is particularly useful for longer posts to see when people lose interest so that you can modify the content or add more visual media to keep them engaged.

How do I set it up?

I am first going to detail the process using MonsterInsights as this is the best approach for a full fledged analytics tracker. Please note that the free version of MonsterInsights does not have scroll tracking included though. The good news though is that MonsterInsights is still at 50% off here.

Method 1 – MonsterInsights

After installing and activating the latest version of MonsterInsights in WordPress go to the settings page and click the following checkbox.

Then press save changes top right.

Once activated you will find your scroll tracking report under the Publishers report, next to the interests section.

When you have scroll tracking enabled by MonsterInsights you will also find your data in the Google Analytics dashboard.

Visit the behaviors section

Step 1: Navigate to analytics.google.com and log in to the email account that the profile for your site resides in.

Step 2: When you’re logged into Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior » Events » Overview.

Step 3: Click Scroll Depth:

Step 4: To get more detailed information, click “Event Label”.

Step 5: You can now see many events are getting triggered for each percentage of scroll tracking.

Step 6: You can add secondary dimensions for these events to view the behavior on specific pages and see which ones are the most sticky:

Method 2 – Track User Scrolling With WP Scroll Depth Plugin

If you don't want or have the full fledged analytics solution that MonsterInsights is, there is a dedicated plugin for scroll tracking called WP Scroll Depth.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Scroll Depth plugin on your site.

After activating, you need to go to Settings » Scroll Depth to configure the settings.

The default options will track scroll depth for all pages on your WordPress site. All you need to do is click on the Save Changes button to store plugin settings.

WP Scroll Depth plugin uses jQuery to track scrolling on your WordPress site. It monitors four scroll points 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the page height. When a user reaches a scroll point, the plugin sends an event to Google Analytics using jQuery.

After that, you can view Scroll Depth event data under Real-Time » Events on your Google Analytics dashboard.