Have you ever thought about your blog’s performance? Well, of course, you use Google Analytics and check on bounce rate and all, but is that all that you need to know to understand how your blog is doing and how much users are liking or content?
Is it good enough to understand how your users are reacting to each and every post that you publish?
Are they going through all of it or changing the article mid way?
Using bounce rate and analytics won’t tell you anything about these but you can certainly boost your analytics to help you with other important info.
What you have to do is add Scroll Depth Tracking to each of your WordPress posts and pages and you will have all the data in your analytics feed automatically.
So, before you get started, its time to know a bit about Scroll Depth Tracking.
Why do you need Scroll Depth Tracking?
Well, it’s obvious that as a blog writer you have no idea what is the perfect size of the content that your readers would love to have on your blog.
This will certainly mean that some of your blog visitors will never get to the end of your blog and will eventually lose interest in your blog posts and you will start losing visitors as a result.
Knowing the length of the article that your users prefer will certainly help you.
Having said that, it is up to you to judge whether you really need to cut short your blog post size or not.
It might so happen that not all of your visitors are like-minded and you might get a bit of mix scroll reports.
In this kind of a situation, you have to understand whether most of your visitors are leaving without scrolling the post till the last or a few.
In case you think most of them are behaving the same way, you might have to optimize your blog post length.
How to use Scroll Depth Tracking?
Get the Plugin:
For this work you need to install Google Analytics on your WordPress website.
Change Speed Sampling Rate:
Well, this indicates the percentage of visitors that Google shows through your website.
So how does it work?
Well, in case you have 1% timing data, and you have 100 visitors a day, it will show you as a 1 person on timing data on your Analytics page.
Google allows you to show maximum 100000 visitors daily.
So, until your blog has the maximum visitor count, increase the sampling rate to 100%.
This will allow you to know the exact amount of readers to your website on a daily basis.
Upload / Install Plugin:
In case you are using WordPress dashboard, you can find and add
Plugins from the dashboard itself. In case you are trying to add the Plugin from your server, well
you have to do a bit of hard work. To install the Plugin, find Scroll Depth Tracking Plugin and click Install.
Once done, you are ready to use it. To install it directly on server side, you have to download the Plugin zip file.
Unzip it and you can find a script folder amongst all the directories. Find the file that says “jquery.scrolldepth.js”.
This is the file that you need to upload to your server. Once done, you will be able to access the file from the backend and use it as well.
Using the Plugin:
Working with a plugin is never easy. To add the Plugin to your code and get going you will have to deal with the theme files which are really important for your website.
So, before you start changing codes, it is better to take a full back up of your website.
In case something goes wrong, you will be able to get your website live again.
Go to your WordPress dashboard and find “Appearance”. Under that you will find an option at the bottom “Editor”.
Find the file name “footer.php” and click “edit”. It should come up with
some HTML codes in it.
Using <script> tag, call your Plugin, and it should be done.
In case you installed the Plugin directly from dashboard, then using it will be a bit different from this.
Once you activate the Plugin, you have to go to dashboard and find “Settings”. Click on it and amongst all the options you will be able to find “ScrollDepth”.
Once the Plugin opens, check the default options and click on Save. Remember that the default option is for tracking scroll depth for all the pages and posts.
So, in case you need to change that you have alter in the settings. Once you click on Save, you are done with all your settings.
Remember that Scroll Depth works at specific scroll points like 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. Scroll points in between these cannot be tracked accurately.
Result
The result will be shown on your Google Analytics. On the analytics page, you will be able to find all the data related to your users.
It will let you know how long your users have scrolled on each and every page or post. To view the data Go to “Content” and then click “Events”.
With some tweaks you will also be able to see how long the users are taking to scroll down.
To view this you will have to go to “Content”, then click on “Site Speed”, and then “User Timings”.
This will show you the exact data of the users. Remember that the scroll depth data is shown in percentages.
So, 100% means users have scrolled till the bottom and so on. So, now that you know how long your visitors are scrolling up to you can understand a lot of things out of it.
This will definitely help you in changing your post size and may be the type of content your visitors like, etc.
All these will help you to boost your blog posts and to make your stay ahead of your competitors.
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