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How to Measure How Much of Your Blog Posts Are Read Using Google Analytics and Tag Manager

2019.12.23

Once you launch your Shopify store, you'll likely start writing blog posts to run your own owned media channel.

No matter how much effort you put into writing articles, they're worthless if nobody reads them. In recent years, Google has started evaluating content quality through user behavior data — including whether articles are actually being read and whether they're genuinely useful.

In this article, we'll show you how to use Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to measure whether your blog posts are actually being read.

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Setting Up a Google Tag Manager Account

With Google Tag Manager, you can track visitor behavior on your Shopify store and analyze the data in Google Analytics.

You can also use Google Tag Manager to measure how thoroughly your blog posts are being read.

Let's start by quickly creating a Google Tag Manager account.

Reference

Google Tag Manager

Adding the Google Tag Manager Tag to Shopify

Next, let's set up Google Tag Manager in Shopify.

You'll need to place the Google Tag Manager tag inside both the <head> tag and the <body> tag.

There are several ways to add the tag to Shopify, but in this guide we'll cover the method of inserting it directly into the theme code.

Go to Online Store > Themes > Actions > Edit code.

In the Layout folder, open the theme.liquid file. You'll find the <head> and <body> tags there — paste the respective Google Tag Manager snippets into each one.

In the screenshot, the <head> tag snippet is placed just before </head>, but note that it's recommended to place it as high up inside <head> as possible.

That's it for the tag setup. From here, you'll configure the actions you want to capture in Google Tag Manager.

"What Percentage" and "What Content" of Blog Posts Is Being Read

Let's set things up so we can measure how much of a blog post is being read using these two approaches:

What percentage of the blog post was read?
What content within the blog post was read?

What Percentage of the Blog Post Was Read?

By measuring what percentage of each blog post is read, you can quantitatively understand which articles resonate most with your visitors.

Below, we'll walk through how to configure Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to measure the read percentage for each blog post.

Setting Up the Scroll Depth Variable

First, go to the Variables menu in your Google Tag Manager workspace and click Configure.

Under Built-In Variables configuration, select "Scroll Depth Threshold". This variable will capture the percentage of the blog post that has been viewed — we'll use it in our tag settings shortly.

Setting Up the Tag

Next, go to the Tags screen in your Google Tag Manager workspace and click New.

For Tag Type, select Google Analytics: Universal Analytics.

Configure the tag so you can aggregate what percentage of each page was read. Here's the configuration we'll use:

Track Type: Event
Category: Scroll Depth (feel free to use any name you like)
Action: {{Page URL}}
Label: {{Scroll Depth Threshold}} %
Non-Interaction Hit: True
Google Analytics Settings: Select your target Google Analytics account

Under Advanced Settings, set the Tag firing options to "Once per event".

Setting Up the Trigger

Now let's configure the trigger. A trigger defines when to fire the tag — in other words, what action a visitor needs to take on your Shopify store for the measurement to occur.

For this use case, select "Scroll Depth" as the trigger type.

In the trigger settings, check "Vertical Scroll Depths" and enter the scroll depth percentages you want to track. In our example, we're tracking every 10%.

If you only want to measure blog posts, restrict the trigger to fire on "Some Pages" where the Page URL contains /blogs/.

Once the configuration is complete, save and publish.

We're skipping the details here, but before publishing, always use the Preview mode to verify that everything works correctly.

Analyzing in Google Analytics

Let's check whether data is being captured in Google Analytics.

In Google Analytics, go to Behavior > Events > Top Events. You should see the event category name you configured in Google Tag Manager ("Scroll Depth" in our example).

Click on the event category name to see the tracked pages, then click on the page you want to analyze.

You'll then see how many times visitors scrolled to each depth percentage on that page.

In this example, about 18% of visitors didn't even read 10% of the article — a sign that there may be an issue with the above-the-fold content or hook.

If you calculate the average figures across multiple articles, you'll be able to identify which articles are being thoroughly read and which ones aren't.

What Content Within the Blog Post Was Read?

We just looked at how to measure read depth by percentage, but knowing what percentage was read doesn't always make it easy to pinpoint which specific content caused visitors to drop off.

With a little extra configuration, you can also find out exactly how far into the content visitors read.

Here, we'll show you how to measure which headings (h2 tags) visitors reached before leaving a blog post.

Setting Up a Variable to Store h2 Tag Text

In Google Tag Manager, create a variable to store the text inside h2 tags.

Go to Variables > User-Defined Variables and create a new variable. Set the variable type to "Auto-Event Variable" and the variable type to "Element Text", then save.