GA: Scroll Depth Tracking

There are many ways to measure visitor engagement with a website, one of which is scroll depth tracking. With scroll depth tracking, a site admin can see how many visitors scrolled down the page to read more information. This information can be helpful in determining which pages are most used and locating what visitors are looking for.

For a while, we had scroll depth tracking bundled into the framework and turned on by default. However, we removed the tracking because of the excessive amount of data that it sent back to Google, which was approaching Google's limits. The tracking was originally placed in the framework to determine whether or not visitors scroll bellow the 'fold', and from the data that we gathered, it was obvious that they did. We do not have scroll depth tracking bundled into the framework anymore, but we do have a jQuery plugin that we recommend. That plugin is Scroll Depth.

How to use Scroll Depth with the framework

1. Upload the latest version of Scroll Depth to your website. We maintain a framework and requirejs compatible fork of the Scroll Depth plugin can be found at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/unl/jquery-scrolldepth/requirejs/jquery.scrolldepth.js
2. After your GA tracking code, load and run Scroll Depth. See the example code:

   //ga tracking code here
   
   //custom scroll depth tracking here
   require(['jquery', 'path/to/scrolldepth/jquery.scrolldepth.js'], function($) {
     $.scrollDepth({
       //options (see http://scrolldepth.parsnip.io/)
     });
   });