only 6% of visitors scroll past the fold - hero problem or traffic problem

Question

Put a scroll depth event on the page a fortnight ago. Of about 1,100 visitors, 6% reach the section under the hero. Average time on page is 9 seconds. The hero…

gimbal_gus · Accepted Answer

Split it by source before you rewrite anything a fifth time. Directory traffic scrolling at 3% and search traffic scrolling at 25% is a completely different situation from both sitting at 6%, and right now you're averaging two unrelated populations.

Nine seconds with half your traffic from a directory sounds exactly like people opening tabs from a list and closing them. Look at the search third only. That's the traffic with intent, and it's the traffic you can get more of.

pgpolicy_nadia · Answer

Mild disagreement with treating scroll depth as the problem. Scroll isn't the goal, the click is. I've had pages with awful scroll depth and fine signup rates, because the button was above the fold and the six words did their job.

What's your signup rate from the same 1,100? If it's one or two percent you have a working page and a metric telling you nothing. If it's 0.1%, something is wrong, but a fifth headline rewrite is unlikely to be it.

layer_shift_lu · Answer

Six words that say what it is might genuinely be the problem. 'What it is' answers a question nobody asked. Try one line naming the situation the visitor is in, then the product name, then the button.

The test I use: read the headline out loud to someone who does the job. If they say 'yes, that's annoying' before you explain anything, it works. If they say 'what does it do', it doesn't.

pumptest_pat · Answer

Put the screenshot above the headline for a week. It moves more than the words do.

dbt_and_dust · Answer

Only thing I'd add is checking it on a phone over a throttled connection. My hero image was 1.8MB and on a mid-range Android over patchy 4G the page was blank for several seconds. Everyone who left in that window counted as a visitor with no scroll.

Compressed it and served a smaller version to phones, and my 'nobody scrolls' problem turned out to be a 'nobody sees anything' problem.

only 6% of visitors scroll past the fold - hero problem or traffic problem

8 answers