ClickTale makes some observations about scrolling based on their research of users’ browsing behaviors around “the fold” and “attention”.

In first part of ClickTale Scrolling Report, they show that visitors scroll in a relative way – relative position inside the page, not based on absolute position in terms of pixels.

In the second part of ClickTale Scrolling Report, they analyze how much time visitors paid attention to each section of different-sized web pages as they scrolled through them.

Their report on scrolling makes the following conclusions:

It appears that visitors scroll in a relative way – about the same percentage of page views will reach the middle of a web page regardless of the actual page height in pixels.

Visitors appear to be using the location of the scroll bar but not the size of the tracker when scrolling, since the scroll bar location is a relative indicator and the scroll tracker size is an indicator of page height.

Below the 1,000 pixel-line, the number of visitors declines in a linear fashion vs. their relative page location.

Visitors’ Attention follows a similar pattern for pages of different heights. It peaks both near the page top, at 540 pixels, and near the bottom, about 500 pixels from the end of the page.

Excluding behavior effects at the page top and bottom, attention decreases exponentially as visitors scroll down the page.

Recommendations (i.e. what does this all mean to me?)

• The most valuable web page real-estate is located near the page top, between 0 and 800 pixels.
• Visitor Attention and Page Exposure peak at about the 540 pixel-line.
• If you have a long web page,  add “stop points” such as headers and images to prevent your visitors from quickly scrolling down the page. It will prevent their attention from waning towards the end of the page.
• The footer of your page is important! Users do pay quite a bit of attention to that area of your page.