your best article has a graveyard at the 40% mark.
most people who open it never reach the end. you already suspect this. the question is whether your analytics can prove it without also proving everything else about your reader.
most scroll-depth tooling comes bundled with the rest of the surveillance kit. heatmaps, session recordings. the scroll number is the excuse and the recording is the product. you wanted one number and you bought a security camera.
cloudline tracks scroll depth as four markers: 25, 50, 75, 100%. when a visitor crosses one, that's a data point. the page, the marker, nothing else. no replay, no heatmap, no pixel path of where the cursor wandered while they read. the interesting thing about a scroll marker is that it doesn't need a who. "somebody reached 75% of this page" is already the whole decision.
i'm om yaduvanshi, 18, an applied ai developer building cloudline, a cookieless analytics tool. day 24 of 90, building in public.
the four markers
a pageview in cloudline stores four things: page, referrer, screen size, time. scroll depth adds the marker crossed. that's the event. four thresholds, coarse by design. finer markers would be more precise. they would also cost more of the visitor's privacy for a number nobody acts on.
coarse numbers are harder to game, too. you can't inflate the number without changing the page, and changing the page is the actual work.
what the markers changed for me
i used to read pageviews and feel good. then i looked at scroll depth on my own articles and felt worse, in a useful way. the drop-off point is the most honest feedback a writer gets. comments tell you what the loudest reader thinks. scroll depth tells you what the quiet ones did. it told me my intros were too long. they were.
pair it with engaged time and you get the full story. time without scrolling is an open tab. scrolling without time is a skim. both together, still no identity, and you know whether the piece landed.
the honest caveat
four markers can't tell you which paragraph lost them. a heatmap could. i don't have heatmaps, and i don't want the data they'd need. if your whole job is squeezing a landing page, this isn't your tool. that's fine. most pages just need to know where the graveyard is.
the question i don't have an answer to
does 100% mean they read it, or does it mean they scrolled fast looking for the link? i don't know. my money is on "looking for the link," but that's a guess. if you run a content site, what does your 100% row look like?
day 24 of 90. still building.
cloudline is free while in early access. no card.
— om
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