What is Scroll Event in Google Analytics 4?

Tracking how far people scroll down your pages is one of the cleanest ways to see if your content is actually hitting the mark. Instead of just knowing someone landed on your page, you can see if they cared enough to read it. This article breaks down exactly what the Google Analytics 4 scroll event is, why it matters, and how to find and use this data to make better decisions.

What is the Scroll Event in GA4?

The scroll event is a built-in feature of Google Analytics 4 that automatically tracks when a user reaches the bottom of a web page for the first time. It is part of a group of events called "Enhanced Measurement," which are designed to give marketers more useful data right out of the box without any custom coding.

Here’s the key detail: the GA4 scroll event fires only when a user has scrolled through 90% of the vertical depth of a page. This isn't a continuous measurement of scrolling, it’s a single event that triggers once that 90% threshold has been crossed during a pageview. If a user scrolls up and down the page but never hits that 90% mark, the event won’t fire. Likewise, if they scroll past 90%, then scroll back up and down again, it will only count the first time.

This is a major change from its predecessor, Universal Analytics (UA). In UA, tracking scroll depth required a custom setup, usually involving Google Tag Manager to create triggers and tags for specific percentages like 25%, 50%, and 75%. With GA4, this basic level of tracking is enabled by default, making it much easier to get started.

Why Is Scroll Tracking More Than Just an Engagement Metric?

Knowing that users are scrolling is great, but its real value comes from how you apply that insight. Raw event counts don't tell a story, but when you connect them to your content and goals, they become a powerful diagnostic tool for your website.

1. Validating Content Quality

A "view" just tells you someone arrived. A scroll event tells you they stayed and engaged. If you publish a 2,000-word blog post and see a high number of scroll events, you have a strong signal that the content was compelling enough to hold the reader's attention. Conversely, a page with lots of views but very few scroll events suggests a problem. Maybe the headline was great clickbait, but the intro failed to hook the reader.

High Scroll Counts Indicate: Engaging introductions, well-structured content, and topics that resonate with your audience.
Low Scroll Counts Suggest: Misleading titles, a boring "above the fold" section, slow page load times, or a wall of unappealing text.

2. Improving User Experience (UX)

Scroll data is a looking glass into user behavior. Pages with poor scroll-through rates are prime candidates for A/B testing and UX improvements. You can start asking critical questions:

Is our "key information" banner so large that users think the page ends there?
Are pop-ups or ads interrupting the reading experience and causing people to leave?
Is the format unreadable on mobile devices, preventing users from getting far?

By identifying pages where users drop off, you can focus your optimization efforts where they'll have the biggest impact.

3. Optimizing Call-to-Action (CTA) Placement

This is one of the most practical applications of scroll data. Let's say your primary call-to-action - like a "Request a Demo" or "Buy Now" button - is located at the very bottom of your landing page. You check your analytics and discover that only 15% of page visitors ever trigger the scroll event.

You’ve just discovered a major revenue-related problem: 85% of your visitors never even see your most important button. Armed with this knowledge, you can decide to move the CTA higher up the page, make it sticky in the navigation bar, or repeat it halfway through the content to increase visibility and conversions.

4. Informing Your Content Strategy

When you start analyzing scroll data across your entire site, patterns will emerge. You might discover that your "how-to guides" consistently have higher scroll rates than your "news roundup" posts. Or maybe product pages with a customer testimonial section get read more thoroughly than those without one.

This information is content strategy gold. It helps you understand what formats, topics, and layouts perform best, so you can stop guessing and start creating more of what works.

How to Check If Scroll Tracking Is Enabled

For most new GA4 properties, scroll tracking is enabled by default as part of Enhanced Measurement. However, it's always a good idea to double-check, especially if you're not seeing any scroll events in your reports. Here’s how:

Navigate to the Admin section of your GA4 property (the gear icon in the bottom-left).
In the Property column, click on Data Streams.
Select the appropriate web data stream for your website.
Look for the Enhanced measurement section. Click the gear icon on the right to manage the settings.
A list of events will appear. Make sure the toggle switch next to Scrolls is turned on.

If it was off, simply toggle it on and hit "Save." GA4 will start collecting scroll events immediately. Note that this change isn't retroactive, it will only apply to data going forward.

Finding and Analyzing Scroll Data in GA4

Merely collecting data isn't enough, you need to know where to find it and how to make it useful. The default event report for scroll is quite limited, but with one small adjustment, you can unlock its true value.

Step 1: Locate the Pages and Screens Report

The best place to analyze scroll data is where you can see it on a page-by-page basis. Navigate to: Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens

By default, this report shows you page views, new users, and average engagement time for each page on your site.

Step 2: Add "Scroll" as a Metric

This is the essential step. The default view doesn't show scroll data.

In the Pages and screens report, look at the table of data. Click the dropdown arrow next to any metric header, like Views.
A selection menu will appear. Search for or select Event count.
Under the Event count submenu, choose scroll.

The table will now reload with a new column showing the total number of scroll events for each page. You can now see exactly which of your pages are getting scrolled to the 90% mark.

Step 3: Calculate Your Scroll Rate

The raw number of scrolls is useful, but the percentage of users who scrolled is even better. This is your "scroll rate," and it normalizes the data, allowing you to compare a page with 10,000 views to one with 500 views fairly.

The formula is simple: (Scroll Events / Views) * 100 = Scroll Rate %

Unfortunately, GA4 doesn't calculate this for you in standard reports. To analyze this, you can either do it manually for your top pages or export the data to Google Sheets or Excel.

Example in Action:

Blog Post A: 1,200 Views and 960 Scroll Events.
(960 / 1,200) * 100 = 80% Scroll Rate
Blog Post B: 5,000 Views and 1,500 Scroll Events.
(1,500 / 5,000) * 100 = 30% Scroll Rate

While Post B got far more traffic, Post A is significantly more engaging. Its readers are much more likely to be consuming the entire piece. This insight could prompt you to figure out what Post A does so well and apply it to Post B and other articles.

Limitations and When to Use a Custom Setup

While the default scroll event is a huge step up, it's not perfect. There are some situations where you might need more granular data.

The All-or-Nothing Approach: GA4’s event only tells you if users hit 90%. It doesn’t tell you if they reached 25%, 50%, or 75%. For a very long article, knowing that only 10% of users make it to the bottom isn't as helpful as knowing that 70% make it halfway. The drop-off points are missing.

Short Pages: On a very short page, like a "Thank You" or confirmation page, nearly everyone might hit the 90% threshold. In this case, the scroll event offers little value because it doesn't differentiate behavior.

When you need more detail, the solution is to implement custom scroll depth tracking using Google Tag Manager (GTM). With GTM, you can easily set up triggers that fire custom events when users reach 25%, 50%, and 75% scroll depths. This provides a complete picture of content consumption and helps you pinpoint exactly where in your content users lose interest.

Final Thoughts

GA4's built-in scroll event is a simple yet powerful way to measure true content engagement without any complex setup. By looking beyond simple pageviews, you can start to understand which pages are capturing attention, identify UX issues, and make data-driven decisions about where to place your most important content and calls-to-action.

Pulling these scroll metrics and pairing them with sales and ad performance data from other platforms is often the next step in creating a full-funnel view. At my company, we found this cross-platform reporting process to be incredibly time-consuming, which is why we built Graphed. It connects to your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Facebook Ads, so you can use natural language to quickly build dashboards and reports. Instead of exporting CSVs, you can simply ask, "create a report showing my top 10 Shopify products and their analytics from GA4" and get a live, shareable dashboard in seconds.