Since the introduction of the Scroll Depth Tracking – Google Tag Manager native solution which included the introduction of a new trigger that natively handles the scroll depth tracking, a few bugs have been spotted. The trigger has no working option to delay firing until the page is fully loaded and tends to start firing events before the DOM is loaded, which causes a problem when it comes to accurately representing user engagement.

The first known bug, has to do with page refresh and was mentioned by Simo Ahava at the end of this post. The issue has to do with how the browser handles the refresh. In cases where you have scrolled to the bottom of a page and you refresh that page, the trigger fires all of the thresholds at once, after the page loads again.

Additionally, there are some issues with websites that utilize AJAX for dynamically changing/adding elements to a page. In such cases, the trigger tends to fire multiple times while loading the page and the user hasn’t even begun to scroll.

These are known issues by now and there should probably be a fix released soon. By then, the Scroll Depth Tracking with a jQuery plugin is always a valid option.

If you came across any other bugs and unusual website behavior when implementing the native scroll depth tracking solution from GTM, drop a comment below and let me know 🙂