Scroll depth metric and unique visitors

[jelleno11]

Hi there, What is the best way to estimate the number of unique visitors who saw 50% of a page? Are there any gotchas in extrapolating out from page views to visits to unique visitors and creating a calculation? I would welcome a recommended approach. Thank you!

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Scroll depth tracking is a whole can of worms... more so when dealing with Adobe which is not a heartbeat tracking system (and while yes, you can make it do that, but you will blow you budget of server calls, so I don't recommend doing that )

Now, that said, Adobe does have a plugin you can add called "getPercentPageViewed" (https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/implementation/vars/plugins/getpercentpageviewed.h...), and basically it will record the different scroll depth info from the previous page (final %, highest % reached, initial %, etc). So if the user closes the browser, or types a new URL into their browser and navigates away from the site without triggering a new tracking call, those pages will be missing data.

Now, of course, you also have to pay attention to the device/screen width... as some content will appear differently or more condensed on a mobile phone (or stacked a lot higher on a mobile phone) then would be displayed on a desktop device... so 50% on a phone will be a very different position than 50% on a tablet and very different again from 50% on a large monitor..... 

So for basic info, this will probably work for you.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Sorry, as for classifying the data.. by UV is tricky, since most users will fall into multiple bucks of %... so making sure that you can properly represent those users (without massive cross-over is tricky)

The first thing I would do would be to track the Max %, then create a classification rule on this to get "under 50%" and "50% plus", at least as a start....

Now, I would create visitor level segments based on this data, but, I would make sure to "timebox" the segment to say something like 7 days, or 30 days, or something that makes sense (as "visitor" will be all time without specifying a data range)... and in these segments to try and combat the visitor cross over, I would create something that looks for

(the under 50%)

VISITOR:

"under 50%" 

AND

exclude ["50% plus"]

AND

Last 30 full Days

(basically, only show users who NEVER scrolled more than 50% in the last 30 full days)

then create one for (over 50%)

VISITOR:

"under 50%" 

AND

Last 30 full Days

so the over 50% will include users who hit pages that scrolled beyond 50%, but also any pages that didn't (basically these users at some point scrolled over 50% - maybe not all of the time, but they did)

This should prevent all the user cross over....

[MattCoen]

I use 3 event variables. One for 25%, 50%, and 75% scroll.

I only fire the additional scroll calls on templates where the scroll really matters. As Jen mentioned, you will increase your server call volume.

I then created calculated metrics for scroll rates and use 50% scroll rate as a content KPI (50% scrolls/page views).  I would not use Unique Visitors as that could cross visits.

You do need to take into consideration that the page size is a factor and 50% is not the same number of pixels on all pages.