Reply To: Can I optimise towards things like scroll-depth and number of pages clicked into? I’m new-ish to paid search (2 years) & am working on a response to brief for a 2nd stage interview.

[smarkman19]

You’re on the right track: your main “conversion” here should be meaningful engagement on that education page, not sales.
You can’t feed scroll-depth or time-on-page directly into Google’s native goals, but you can turn them into proxy conversions with GA4 + GTM and then import them into Google Ads. For example, fire an event when:
– Scroll depth > 75%
– Time on page > 45–60s
– Clicks to the store locator
Then in Ads, set those as primary conversions (or give store-locator clicks higher value), and run tCPA or tROAS on that. Just keep it to 1–3 clean events or the algo gets noisy.
For “authority” angle, build custom intent audiences off those queries, add remarketing on long readers, and use them in upper-funnel Search/YouTube.
I usually gut-check this kind of proxy setup with tools like Hotjar and GA4 path reports; I’ve also used SparkToro and then Pulse plus social listening to see what questions people actually ask so the landing page content matches real search intent. So yes, it’s possible and practical if you define tight engagement events upfront.