How to Add Scroll Depth Tracking in WordPress with Google Analytics?

How to Add Scroll Depth Tracking in WP with Google Analytics?Scroll depth tracking enables you to see how far a user scrolls any page. This data helps you in tracking if visitors are actually reading your long-form content and they lose their interest on your post. So you can modify and make changes accordingly to keep them engaged.

In this post, we show you how you can track user scrolling in WodPress using Google analytics.

Why track user scrolling in WordPress?

Basically, Scrolling happens when a user wish to see available content on your page below preview screen. It is a initial activity every user perform to look at your content.

This makes scroll depth tracking important to track user engagement with your content. Additionally it offers you various insights about user interaction on your website and help you improve your pages for optimal length.

For Instance- You can track data for how much an average user scrolls and spend time when visit your website, which long form content they like the most and what makes their interest lose.

With these tracking data and insights, you can optimize your pages for higher conversions and better user engagement.

Tracking Scroll Depth with Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is free web tracking tool offered by Google to help better understand your visitor insights. It allows you to track who are your visitors, where they are from, how long they stay, which pages they visit and how far down they scroll website pages and many more.

Generally Google Analytics track the metrics like page views, number of visitors and top pages. For advance metrics like scroll depth, form submission, ecommerce tracking, downloads, event tracking and others. Analytics needs you to setup custom tracking.

Setting up advanced Google analytics tracking manually needs a lot of technical skills. As a beginner, this is nearly impossible to do it properly. Even some developers can’t do it properly.

Thankfully, there are plenty of plugins that can help you to track advanced metrics such as scroll depth in google analytics.

Let’s have a look at 2 most used plugins to setup scroll depth tracking in WordPress.

How to Add Scroll Depth Tracking in WP with Google Analytics?

  1. Scroll Depth Tracking in WordPress with MonsterInsights:-

Monsterinsights is most popular analytics plugin for WordPress with 2,000,000+ active installations.  It allows you to setup Google analytics on your WordPress site without using code.

With this plugin, you can enable advanced tracking such as ecommerce tracking, affiliate links, downloads, form tracking, scroll depth with just a single click.

Monsterinsights comes with scroll depth tracking enabled by default. That means you don’t need to configure any settings. All you just need to install and activate Monsterinsights plugin.

Upon activation, Go to Insights>> Settings and click on engagement. The plugin trigger events in Google analytics as your visitors scroll down then it will be tracked in analytics as 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% scroll.

You can check your tracking stats and other insights right inside your WordPress admin dashboard by navigating to Monster Publisher reports (Insights>> Reports>> Publishers). The Scroll depth data displays next to interest section.

View User Scrolling Data in Google Analytics:

Now you have setup scroll depth tracking with Monsterinsights. You can view its reports in google analytics as well. Login to analytics account and navigate to Real time>> Events to see scrolling data of real time or of last 30 minutes.

For complete data, visit Behavior>> Events>> Overview from analytics dashboard. Click on Scroll depth for more details.

  1. Track user scrolling with WP Scroll Depth Plugin:-

If you don’t want a comprehensive Google analytics solution and rather use a single plugin, then make use of WP Scroll depth.

Initial thing you need to do is to install and activate WP Scroll depth plugin.  Upon activation visit Settings>> Scroll Depth to configure plugin settings.

Default setting will track scroll depth for all pages on your WordPress site.  All you just need to do is click on save changes to store the plugin setting.

WP scroll depth plugins uses jQuery to track scrolling on WordPress site. It also monitors four scrolling points 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of page height.

When a user reaches to scroll point, plugin sends an event to Google analytics using jQuery. After that, you can review Scroll depth event data under Real time>> Events on analytics dashboard.