Having a high visitor scroll depth on your website is a very important metric to consider if you want to properly monetize the website. It dictates if your visitors can view your ads, click on affiliate links and CTA buttons, read your sales offers, fill out your email submission forms, and so on. All webmasters understand that having visitors coming to your site is one thing but having them scroll down to read your content is the real deal.
In this article, we are showing you how you can increase the scroll depth of your website by doing A/B tests on the components of your websites’ pages. Read along to learn how you can set up simple A/B tests that will enable you to find out the key components that can improve the scroll depth rate of your website.
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Getting Started with Scroll Depth Tracking
Scroll depth refers to the rate at which visitors scroll down on your website. On the other hand, scroll depth tracking refers to a method of tracking how users scroll throughout your site.
To understand how deep/ far your website’s visitors scroll to read the content on your web pages, you need to track this by the use of a tracking software. Several tools can track this and they include:
Using any of these tracking tools will show you the scroll depth of your website.
What Is a Good Scroll Depth?
According to Isaac Adams-Hands, the SEO director of SEONorth; A scroll-depth of 50% would be good for Short-form content of 1 250 words/ page or under, whereas 75% scroll depth would be acceptable for long-form content of 2 000 words or more/ page.
This means that the longer your content, the higher your scroll depth should be.
Having less than that suggested scroll depth on your page leads to a high bounce rate. That’s to say, your visitors are bouncing away and your page needs improvement to retain a strong engagement.
Low scroll depth = High bounce rate
Why You Need to Track Your Scroll Depth
Tracking your scroll depth allows you to see:
- How far do users scroll down your pages.
- Links that users are clicking to navigate your site. Menu links, Internal text links, Sidebar links, or Footer links.
- If red-colored links convert better than blue-colored links.
- If your menu is used properly.
- If users are interested in your content.
- How users engage with your website.
Here a webmaster shares a few details he learned after doing his first scroll depth tracking on his website:
Tracking your scroll depth will give you a bigger picture of how to perform conversion rate optimization for your website.
Improving the Scroll Depth of Your Website
To improve the scroll depth of your website, you need to master the techniques of A/B testing. A/B testing is a randomized experiment of comparing two versions of a webpage against each other to determine which one performs better or meets a given KPI.
In an A/B test, two or more variations of a page are equally and randomly displayed to users, and statistical analysis is done to determine which variation performs better for a given goal or KPI using a tracker. For this case, our main goal or KPI is attaining a high scroll rate.
To attain a high scroll rate via A/B testing, you need to test variations of the same page with modifications in different components like:
- The headlines;
- The size of the top menu;
- The size of the text blocks an images;
- The color of CTA buttons;
- The position of email sign up forms;
- The background colors, and so on.
How A/B Testing Works
In an A/B test, you take a webpage and modify it to create a second version of the same page. This modification can be as simple as a change of the headline, the position of links, or a complete redesign of the page.
Then, 50% of the traffic is sent to the original version of the page (Variant A) and the other 50% is sent to the modified version of the page (Variant B).
Meanwhile, as the visitors are sent to either variant A or variant B, their actions and engagement with each page are tracked and the statistics are therefore collected, organized, and displayed by tracking software.
Once you have had a number of visitors that can give you statistically significant data, you can check the statistics to see if the modifications on the second page led to an increase or decrease in the scroll depth.
If the scroll depth is high on Variant B compared to the original page, you can choose to redirect all the traffic to it. And if Variant B doesn’t improve the scroll depth, you can go ahead and create other variations of the page until you get the desired scroll depth.
A/B Testing Process
The following is an A/B testing framework you can use to start running tests:
- Collect data
- Identify goals
- Generate hypothesis
- Create variations
- Run experiment
- Track and analyze results
The Best A/B Testing Tools and Software
Setting up A/B tests and tracking events on a webpage is not difficult. All this can be done by the use of online tools and software including:
A/B Testing & SEO
Many webmasters worry that A/B testing might lower their search engine rankings, but it’s not the case. Google actually permits and encourages A/B testing. Google has stated that performing an A/B or multivariate test poses no inherent risk to your website’s search rank. However, it is possible to jeopardize your search rank by abusing an A/B testing tool for purposes such as cloaking.
Google has articulated some best practices to ensure that this doesn’t happen:
- No cloaking;
- Use rel= "canonical” attribute to point the variations back to the original version of the page;
- Use 302 redirects instead of 301s.
Conclusion
Tracking and improving your website’s scroll depth is very vital if you want to have a successful website. The most important benefit is that it can help you meet your most important KPIs. Like increased sales, fewer bounce rates, better engagement, more conversions, and other aforementioned benefits that lead to more revenue for your website.
