: How to know if visitors are reading my long-form articles? I have a website with a couple of long how to's and I would like to know if people are actually reading those articles when they

@Shelley277

The solution that has been working for me, is to check for the appearance of a specific DOM element's appearance in view.

For instance, you may have a #comment element after the article content. So check for its appearance in the view since there is no way the user can get to it unless they scroll the page or jump to that section of the page.

You can check for its appearance by firing some isInView(element) function triggered by window.onscroll().

Then, when the element is in view, fire off a GA event (or perform some other function), specifying the end of the article was reached, the article path, and maybe with the time it took to read as expressed by the difference between timeBeganReading & timeCheckElementAppeared... if that sort of information is important to you. For a user skimming the article content, a variable described as timeSpentReading would indicate how long it took to get to the element.

Further, you can stop testing for the DOM element being in view by setting some variable to true once it IS in view, and updating the control block within the isInView(element) function to also test for the true/false value of the variable. Once it evaluates to true, the isInView(element) function will stop firing.

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@Gail5422790

This is just a quick answer: You could simply place the content in a div with a height or width (which ever you need) that clips the content at say... 50% of the article height with overflow:hidden; then add a simple button with javascript to animate the height/width property to its full size... or add overflow:scroll; or a few other methods... anyways onto the point:

Google analytics allows for event tracking inclusive of button clicks (or really any click event) so you could see how many people were getting to the 50% mark of your article and clicking the expand button/link.

Here is Google's link on event tracking as well as examples of how to set it up.

Google Event Tracking in Analytics

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