Why You Need Scroll Depth For Your Website

11th Apr 2018

Why You Need Scroll Depth For Your Website

So you've got your new website. You've had it all designed and looking smart. You've got Google Analytics (or the equivalent) telling you what's what and you're feeling very professional. However, your bounce rate is high and a quick search tells you that this is a bad thing. And so you panic. But please don't; if you find that it is high, it might be because all your relevant information is on that one page. To help decipher all this and put your mind at ease, install scroll depth.

Scroll depth is basically a measure of how far people scroll down a webpage, in percentages. It can assist in interpreting and sifting through those who are interested and those who are bored. While bounce rates tell you if a person explored or 'bounced,' setting up scroll depth will allow a more detailed look into who reached the bottom of your pages.

 

For example, if the bounce rate is scarily high, but you have a video on your homepage detailing your company and what it's about, your audience can potentially get all the relevant information from this and therefore feel no need to explore further. However, if your video is situated towards the lower end of the page and the scroll depth informs you that on average, only 25% of it has been read at a time, then you have permission to panic.

 

As a rule of thumb, you should generally place your more exciting content nearer the top of your pages, to avoid it being missed by those too disinterested to scroll down. That doesn't mean to say that you should leave all your boring stuff at the bottom. Using a blog post as an example, entice your audience at the start with a good introduction as a little persuasion tool for them to scroll down, hit them with your moneymaker in the middle and then leave links to other interesting related content at the end. And of course, you can track this all to see if it works with scroll depth.

 

It also significantly helps with analysing the positives and negatives of your site - if a high number of individuals only reach a certain point on one or more of your pages, this could signal that your information is not clearly laid out, your site is difficult to navigate efficiently or it is simply not attention-grabbing enough. Therefore, it'll help maximise your site's potential in order to reach your target audience's concentration.

 

Scroll depth is a key factor to think about during that crucial planning stage of your website, as it indicates the number of people truly reading your work, particularly when it's quite content heavy. Those percentages will show if all your labour has paid off, or if you need to work a little harder to get that engagement.

 

Please don't feel the need to track all your pages with scroll depth - focus it mainly on blog pages, if you have any, and any other page which is significantly longer than others. Pages that are using scroll depth but only the depth of the standard screen size will not be helpful in providing conducive data and, to be honest, would be a waste of time.

 

It just goes to show that you don't have to listen to all the people telling you your bounce rate is bad. Using scroll depth, you can accurately get a measure of whether your call to action has been successfully reached, even if it is situated on the one page.

 

I feel like a slight fraud as I am not an expert in this field, but it just goes to show that if I can use it without hassle, then you definitely can too.



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