In this post I’ll show you how to measure Page Scrolling in Google Data Studio. I’ll also show how you can set up the correct tracking in Google Tag Manager so you can see how far along your page users scroll.

Setting up Scroll Tracking in Google Tag Manager

Before you start setting up the tags, click on Variables and make sure all the Scrolling variables are added on your workspace.

Next, click to add a new tag.

Choose a Google Analytics – Universal Analytics tag type.

You can then set up the tag as shown below.

Track Type = Event
Category = Scrolling
Action = {{Scroll Depth Threshold}}
Label = {{Scroll Depth Units}}
Non-Interaction Hit = True
Google Analytics settings = Your GA tracking code variable

Important Note on Non-Interaction Hit

In the first version of this post I did not include making sure that the Non-Interaction Hit is set to “True”.

That resulted in my Bounce Rate dropping because it was registering the Scrolling Events as hits. However, someone arriving on your page, scrolling 10% of the way down should still be considered a bounce. Therefore make sure to adjust the Non-Interaction Hit from the default false to True.

Now, we need to create our trigger. Click to add a new Trigger.

Choose the Scroll Depth trigger type from the User Engagement trigger category.

Name it ‘Scroll Depth Trigger’.

Make sure ‘Vertical Scroll Depths’ is ticked and Percentages is chosen. Then added the following percentages: 10,25,50,75,90. You’re obviously able to choose your own percentage values if you want.

Now we can test out the tag using Google Tag Manager preview mode.

In GTM preview mode, you can see if the tag is working correctly, as shown below.

We can also take a look in Google Analytics to see if the Events are registering.

We can see if the Scrolling events are appearing properly in Google Analytics.

Measuring Page Scrolling in Google Data Studio

The next step is to create a report in Data Studio to measure and monitor how far down the page our website visitors are scrolling.

First we can create a bar chart that has the following dimension and metric;
Dimension = Event Action
Metric = Total Events

We also need to create a table filter set up like below:

Include > Event Category > Equal to (=) > Scrolling

Update to displaying the number of Scrolling Events

So since I wrote this post, Data Studio has been updated with some new features! One of the new features is to display metrics as a Percentage of the Total.

So below I show how you can get the number of events to display as a percent of the total, which makes it easier to understand in my opinion.

Percentage of scrolls for each page

To make sure we can see the percentage of scrolls for each page we can add another table showing a list of pages by page views.

Dimension = Page Title
Metric = Page views

Make sure to enable filtering by ticking the box next to “Apply Filter” (not shown below).

And with the page table and the scrolling bar chart set up, you can now see how far down the page most users get.

Hope you found this article about how to measure page scrolling in Google Data Studio useful.

My Other Blog Posts

If you liked this article you might like my other blog posts.