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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.
Posted by on December 31, 2025 at 4:28 pmContext: Client sells skincare, but they're not D2C. They sell their products via retailers, so they let retailers handle the lower-funnel, branded campaigns.
Client goal: Drive 'engaged' users to a specific page that promotes one of their key products. A secondary goal is to establish themselves as an authority in their field.
Campaign type: Text ads. The client specified that this is what they want.
My approach:
I'm using a 'user-journey' approach, trying to think about the steps the user would take. An example of their journey below.
- Woman aged 27 has an issue with her skin. She’s not sure why or how to fix it, so she heads to Google.
- She Googles ’Why does my face have dark spots’. She’s expecting to see an ad with a little explanation of why her skin is dry and to be redirected to a relevant page with actual, credible informatiion about her hyperpigmentation.
- She lands on a page with images and a detailed explanation of the factors contributing to dark spots. At the bottom of the page is the product we want to promote. The goal is for her to actually engage with the content and eventually scroll down and explore the product. If she were to click the page, she would land on a 'Store locator' page because (as said) we don't do D2C.
Is it possible to use smart bidding to optimise towards things like:
– Scroll depth?
– Users clicking through to a specific page (e.g., the store locator page)
– Time spent on the page?
Some of these signals are weaker than others, but I just want to know whether this is POSSIBLE first. If it is possible, is it PRACTICAL?
Thanks in advance for reading and answering (if you do). As said, I'm a newb and have social anxiety so I beg ohhhhh be nice 🙂.
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1 Reply
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Yes it’s possible. Tag Manager for example can trigger code snippets for such conditions. So you can do it on all platforms, even non-Google ones.
Is it practical? Not really.
You would probably just optimize to leads/sales/addtocarts. Maybe clicks at first for a while. Maybe to qualified leads eventually if you set up offline conversions.
But to scroll depth or otherwise? Probably not.
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For the interview sake, that does make sense to drive to a proxy goal & for sure is possible to optimise toward that sort of signal, as long as you can implement tracking on the landing page. It is somewhat popular with the big FMCG brands to do that.
As to whether that is helping the lower funnel / sales activity with the retailers, i’d focus the answer around advanced measurement with solutions like data clean rooms making it somewhat possible to connect the dots in place, especially if you can get some form of authenticated PII from the user as they browse the landing pages.
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Yes, it’s possible. We did this when I worked on the UNICEF account, but it was for branding and upper funnel efforts. We created a custom conversion event in GA4 called engaged visits (combo of two or more actions a user took from a list of ten on-page events such as scroll depth or video view).
You can import the custom KPI (conversion action) to Google Ads and use it as a campaign level goal for bidding. We then established benchmarks for volume of engaged visits acquired and cost per engaged visit.
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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. -
Scroll depth is very easy its in the trigger portion of GTM .
Same with time spent on site. For both go to the trigger section and type in scroll depth or time spent and either trigger will show up. You then use Fires of Some Clicks at the bottom with {Page Path URL} and list the URL you want to fire on.
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Set a custom conversion for the exact action you want and let smart bidding optimise to that because google only learns from events you pass back, not metrics like scroll depth that stay inside analytics
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Yep! You can add custom goal conversion tracking based on the actions you mentioned and set those as conversion goal in the campaign, as custom goal!
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Definitely possible. I quite like your thinking and the approach. The truth is, this case is what most of us wouldn’t want. I would personally optimiser towards soft conversions like this, but you need to be extra vigilant on controlling where your ads show. Search network, no Pmax, no search partners. Tight keywords and monitor search terms constantly.
Also, skincare is challenging. Positive roi pretty much requires bottom of funnel, branded keywords. People looking to solve problems don’t want to click on a branded website to be sold their products. They want unbiased, 3rd party recommendations. Eg magazines, blogs, reddit, influencers.
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You can track scroll depth and page interactions as GA4 custom events, then import them as conversion actions in Google Ads… but smart bidding optimizes poorly on weak engagement signals because the algorithm can’t differentiate quality engagement from bot traffic or accidental scrolls.
For non-ECOM clients… I use layered conversion tracking… primary conversions on store locator clicks with assigned values based on historical close rates, secondary conversions on 75%+ scroll depth to build remarketing pools, then feed offline store visit data back through enhanced conversions to teach the algorithm which engagement patterns actually drive retail purchases instead of optimizing blindly.
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