Founded in 1780, Neue Zürcher Zeitung is Switzerland’s newspaper of record and is known for its objective reporting on international news, business, and culture. Yet despite its status and recognition, it faces a challenge well known to publishers globally: increasing the time readers spend engaging with content.
“We wanted to understand what makes people stop reading,” said Martin Jungfer, NZZ’s Head of Audience Engagement*. Keen to quickly get to the bottom of things, Jungfer and his team turned to data for answers.
Analyzing scroll depth impact on reader engagement
For a newspaper that only started printing in color in 2005, NZZ is now among the most innovative media organizations in Europe. From experimenting with intelligent subscription paywalls to leveraging insights about readership to develop new audience engagement strategies, NZZ understands the power of data to create exciting and profitable reader experiences.
The Scroll Depth feature helps us understand when exactly our readers are dropping off, find patterns, and get creative with layouts, copy, images, and more.
NZZ had seen great success using Chartbeat’s optimization tools to experiment with homepage layouts and headlines, to increase click-through rates to articles in real time. Now the question was how to get readers engaged with those articles for longer periods. In came Scroll Depth, a Chartbeat feature that shows how far down readers typically scroll on a given page.
“The Scroll Depth feature helps us understand when exactly our readers are dropping off, find patterns, and get creative with layouts, copy, images, and more,” said Jungfer.
Conducting a scroll depth experiment
An experiment with image positioning resulted in a quick win right off the bat. In the example below, NZZ’s traditional article structure—headline, teaser text, image, body text—saw 81% of readers scroll to the beginning of the body text.
Using this information, the team tested out moving the image further down this fairly lengthy article, with the hopes of getting readers to stay engaged with the content longer.
The result? A 4% increase in readers scrolling to the beginning of the body text, as well as a 4% increase in readers engaging with the article until the end.
“Every single component of an article became an opportunity to challenge the status quo and improve,” he said.
Then, things got really interesting. Long-term assumptions of what an NZZ article should look like went out the window. Everything from sentence length to info-box placement was put into question. Best practices on image content and article views on mobile were disrupted. All this, simply from paying attention to what Scroll Depth data revealed about audience behaviors.
“Every single component of an article became an opportunity to challenge the status quo and improve,” he said.
How subheadings impact article engagement
“One area in which we experimented deeply was article structure…We tried using everything from plain text to bullet points to optimize the reader experience. The data finally told us that our readers enjoyed subheadings the most,” said Jungfer.
Testing the hypothesis out on a number of articles such as this one, the team was able to increase Average Engaged Time almost 20%, to over 60 seconds from 51 seconds.
8 Key Findings from NZZ’s scroll depth analysis
- Info-box positioning is crucial. Readers drop off when they read out-of-context info-boxes that make them jump from the main topic to a side topic.
- Readers do not like repetition. Highlighting a sentence that later gets duplicated in the article body will not do you any favors.
- Think about how readers get to an article. Consider what they’ve already read and appropriately transition into the reading experience.
- Use images wisely. Forget about stock images that don’t add value combined with a caption that paraphrases the article headline.
- Play around with alternative article structures. Move around images and reformat headlines to make it easier for readers to reach the body text.
- For the same article, readers will scroll much deeper on desktop than on mobile. Take this into consideration when formatting content for mobile view.
- Demystify links. Cryptic and confusing links prevent readers from scrolling further.
- Subheads for success. Too many paragraphs of text without subheadings deprive audiences of structured reading.
*Editor’s note: Jungfer recently left NZZ to become Content Innovation Manager at comparis.ch AG.
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