It’s helpful to see how far your website visitors make it down your page. Are your readers seeing the most important piece of content? Do you need to reorganize your page?
With only Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, you can recreate a poor-mans heatmap tool and answer the above questions.
- Google Tag Manager setup
- Google Analytics report
Table of Contents
Google Tag Manager setup
Create a free Google Tag Manager account if do not already have one. Before we get started, click Variables from the left sidebar. Click the “Configure” button from the top of the page. Scroll to the bottom of the pop-out and check all of the boxes under Scrolling.
Create Tag
Click Tags from the left sidebar. Click the New button at the top of the page. Give your tag a name, I use this structure “GoogleAnalytics – Event – Page Scroll Depth”.
Select the Tag Type of Google Analytics: Universal Analytics.
Under Track Type, select “Event”. Then type in the below for each of the fields:
- Category: scroll depth
- Action: {{Page Path}}
- Label: {{Scroll Depth Threshold}}%
The above is the information Google Tag Manager is sending to Google Analytics for reporting. The Category needs to be static to report focus on scroll depth traffic.
Select “True” from the drop-down under Non-Interactive Hit. This prevents this event from affecting your bounce rate. Scrolling on a page is not the same as clicking a link, submitting a form, etc.
Enter your Google Analytics Tracking ID or select the Google Analytics saved variable. Shoot me an email if you’re not sure how to set this up.
Scroll down the Trigger section at the bottom and click “+”. And click “+” again from the top of the page.
Create Trigger
Name the event trigger. I use “scroll – Scroll Depth Tracking”.
Under Trigger Type, select “Scroll Depth”. Check the box “Vertical Scroll Depth” if it’s not already checked.
Enter the below in the Percentages text field:
25,50,75,100
The percentage value is determined by the browser and sent to your Google Analytics account.
Select the bubble next to “All Pages” under “This trigger will fire on”.
Google Analytics report
Open Google Analytics. From the left sidebar click Behavior > Events > Top Events. The Top Events report defaults to the Event Category which we labeled as “scroll depth”.
Click “scroll depth” to filter the report for only visitors who triggered this event.
Now you can layer on the other events. Clicking the Event Category moves you to the Event Action which is the page the visitor was on.
I like to switch from the Event Action to the Event Label by clicking Event Label from above the table. Now, you can add a Secondary dimension using the drop-down. I like to add the Event Action back which will place the page to the right of the percentage viewed. It’s honestly up to you.
That’s it
Enjoy making more informed decisions without spending any money. Improvements or other ideas, email me.