Google Analytics only measure page views by default, any other user interaction (a scroll interaction, click, download, form submit, purchase, etc…) you will need to configure yourself before it’s registered and recorded in Google Analytics. Below you will learn how to measure scroll tracking in Google Analytics by utilizing the power of GTM (Google Tag Manager).
Use scroll tracking to measure if someone has finished reading a page
In recent years, Google has worked hard on adding new triggers to Google Tag Manager, one of them allows you to configure scroll tracking without having to change any of the code on your website. This trigger is called the Scroll Depth trigger, which can be found under User Engagements, and is used to track scrolling through the page (both vertically and horizontally). To view a complete list of all possible triggers, just add a new trigger and click on “Choose a trigger type to begin setup”.
If you select this trigger, you can set the scroll direction (horizontal or vertical), which you will usually want to set to vertical.
After selecting the direction, you can set the intervals. If we want to know if someone finished reading a page, having them scroll to about 80% or 90% should suffice. Depending on the content type, you may also want to change on what kind of pages this scroll trigger fires (e.g. only on /article pages):
Now you can add an event tag in GTM which you can configure however you like. In the example below I only used static values for the category, action and label dimension but you can make them dynamic as well by storing the page URL or title for example.
Linking the above scroll trigger to your newly created Google Analytics Event tag will allow you to register an event whenever a user has finished reading one of your articles.
