I am wanting to track visitors viewing my Sales page on my
website. Now by that I don't mean how they arrived at my page, or the
fact that they did actually arrive - I already do that with tracking
software.
The thing I want to do is track how far they read thru my page before
they leave - now do they leave 25%, 50%, 75%, or at the 100% thru. Did
they get bored at what I said 50% thru ? That way I have more of an
idea on where I need to change my sales copy.
I would imagine that you would put a transparent gif (width=1,
height=1) at the different points thru the Sales page, and track when
they are viewed ? ? (I have my own website hosted with its own domain name)
Would you be able to assist or point me in the right direction ? 
Thank you - Kind Regards - Trevor Foster.

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Clarification of Question by trevorjoy-ga on 01 Mar 2005 05:16 PST

Hi,

The solution provided is unappropriate, and not a workable solution - I do
not want to cut my sales page up into individual pages, as this would be very 
distracting.

Thank you.

Kind Regards - Trevor Foster

There are a several ways you could approach this and many would
require that you put JavaScript in the web pages and then post 
back data regarding the user's behavior on that page, store the
information gathered and then extrapolate from that information.
That's a lot of work and prone to breakdown, but you also could
try a simpler approach.  This is a simple method you could use 
within the framework you have in place to get your metrics:

1) Break your sales copy into a series of text blocks
   and make each one its own web page on your site.
   Make a link on each of these pages to go to the next
   or previous block of text.  Something like this:

       This product will integrate with all of your existing systems!
       No need to read complicated manuals, it will configure itself
       and call customer support for you any time it stops working!

        <back to overview> <back to features>          <learn more>

2) Where your sales copy would normally be placed,
   put an IFRAME with a link to the page containing
   the first block of text.

3) Now all you have to do is compare the total number of page
   requests for each of the pages uou created.  Say you separated your
   sales presentation into sales1.htm .. sales6.htm in step 1 above,
   you might get a report like:
      sales1.htm   100 visits
      sales2.htm    40 visits
      sales3.htm    35 visits
      sales4.htm    30 visits
      sales5.htm     5 visits     
      sales6.htm     3 visits
   Ideally you'd eliminate the same user revisiting a previous page in the
   presentation, because this might mean that they got confused and went
   back to clarify or were trying to read more thoroughly.

You'll still have to make educated guesses as to why page vists drop off,
but you'll at least know where the drop off is occuring.

Good luck Trevor.

Hello Again,

So cutting the sales presentation into pieces won't work.  Now to the
more complicated solutions I mentioned.  By the way, putting small
transparent images into your presentation won't work because the
browser will always download all of them when the page first loads,
whether the user scrolls down to their position on the page or not. 
The images are not even necessarily requested by the browser in the
same order they appear in the HTML.

Since you are going to need to measure some activity performed by the
user, you've only got a couple options left:

If the page is longer than can be displayed in a typical browser, you
can try to get your metrics by detecting when and where the user
scolls the page.  You'll need the user to be scrolling the entire page
or at least a frame.  If the text is in a div tag then this won't work
since JavaScript cannot get the scroll coordinates from a <div> tag. 
So approach it like this:

1) Create 11 blank web pages called scroll0.htm through scroll10.htm
2) In the page with the presentation, put a hidden iframe with
scroll0.htm as its source URL
3) Put an onScroll event on the page that calls a function ScrollPost()
4) The essence of ScrollPost() is that it gets the vertical scroll distance
   and then determines what percentage of the total page height this is.  For
   example, say the page height is 900px and the scrolled distance from the top 
   of the page is 99px.  The page is therefore 11% scrolled, divide the 11 by
   ten and round or simply remove the digit from the one's position, append
   "scroll" on the front and ".htm" on the back to get "scroll1.htm" and set 
   this as the iframe's source URL.
5) Get your metrics from the number of views of the pages created in step 1

Also: You could instead post the scroll data itself, capture it in a
database and then analyze this later, but such pages take longer to
fetch from the server and this could affect the performance of your
scripts.  It's a more ideal solution if you have the resources to do
it.

Some things to keep in mind with the onScroll approach:

1) Some browsers make a (possibly annoying) tick when the user clicks
a link.  Users with this sort of browser will hear the ticking sound
repeatedly everytime they scroll your page.

2) A given "session" may skip over some of the scroll pages, i.e.
request scroll0.htm then scroll3.htm, bypassing scroll1.htm and
scroll2.htm altogether.

3) Whether the user uses the PgUp/PgDn keys, the UpArrow/DnArrow and
Home/End keys will affect your metrics and each user may use more than
one method during a single viewing of your page.

4) Some people turn off JavaScript and in these cases you'll get no data.

5) If a user's browser is big enough that scrolling does not occur
while reading the sales copy, then you won't get any data from the
user, since the onScroll event will never fire.

And finally, if your presentation is small enough that it never
requires the user to scroll, your options are very limited.  In such a
case, you'd need to make the user interact with your presentation
somehow, by mousing over portions or clicking somewhere and trapping
those events.  Good luck with your project.