In September 2017, I wrote that the scroll depth would be a better indicator of whether a piece of content has been read than the pure session duration, which is nonsense anyway. A month later, Google then released a new feature in Google Tag Manager, a trigger for the visibility of elements (the note was missing in the German version of the release notes). This compensates for some disadvantages of the scroll depth approach, especially the restriction that not every page is the same length and “75% read” does not always mean that the content was read to the end (75% was chosen because many pages have an immense footer and therefore users do not scroll down 100%). A page on mine has so many comments that they make up more than half of the content.
What does element visibility mean?
In simple terms, this feature means that a trigger is triggered when an element of the page becomes visible on the user’s screen. The element only needs to be uniquely named, so that only this one element with this name can trigger the trigger. On my site, for example, I would like to know how many users have scrolled down so far that they have finished reading the respective text with a high degree of probability. This is probably the case when users see the reference to the similar articles that are created in my blog by the YARPP plugin. In most browsers, it is possible to select an element with the mouse and then examine the element with a right-click/CTRL click on it, so that we can then see exactly what that element is called.
This trigger can now be set up in the Tag Manager, which looks like this, for example:
In addition, an event is set up, and we have tracking based on the visibility of an element.
Does that really make a difference?
Yes. In my article about a year of experience with Scalable Capital, just under 30% have read at least 75% of the content, but just under 70% have seen the YARPP element. The page consists of almost 80% comments (it is frightening enough that only 70% of the short article saw the element). For other articles, the new measurement of the visibility of elements in Google Tag Manager is not so dramatic; so the article about my bad experiences with the Vorwerk Thermomix is apparently too long for the Thermomix interested party: 26.1% see the YARPP recommendations, 22.3% scroll down to 75%.
Can I turn off the scroll depth now?
No. Of course, you can do whatever you want, but since the session duration becomes more accurate by triggering events, we want to measure not only the time of those who made it to the defined element, but also the time of those who bounced before, for example at 25%. So even if at first glance it looks like we could save 4 events, we should leave these events in to improve the data quality.