Is it possible to tell if a user has viewed a portion of the page?

Question

As the title says on a website is it possible to tell if a user has viewed a portion of the page?

Answer 1

Unless you require a user action of some kind, all you will be able to tell is that they downloaded some portion, not that they actually looked at it.

Answer 2

If you are talking about to check if the user has actually viewed some part of the page you would need to install a web camera and track his eye-movement.

If you are talking about detecting how far the user has scrolled down the page, you can use Javascript to detect this in the OnScroll event. You can then fire some ajax to the server if you need to record this.

Answer 3

Will moving that portion to a separate iframe work? then if they scroll to the bottom, issue a get request for a small image file..forgot the name of the technique..

Update: It is called Web Bug..A Web bug is an object that is embedded in a web page or e-mail and is usually invisible to the user but allows checking that a user has viewed the page or e-mail. One common use is in e-mail tracking. Alternative names are Web beacon, tracking bug, tracking pixel, pixel tag, 1×1 gif, and clear gif.

Answer 4

I'm not sure this would be ethical - but technically if you use javascript, you could detect the mouseover event of each paragraph tag in the document, and then AJAX that information back to the server. As the user scrolls down the page, they're likely to mouse over the paragraphs, and then you know at least approximately where they've read to.

Answer 5

Not reliably, no.

Simple example: I middle-click on a link, which opens it in a new background tab. I then decide against it, and close the tab without ever looking at it. Any JavaScript trick is going to report that I viewed everything above the fold.

More complicated example: A newbie user doesn't have the browser window maximised, and a portion of the browser window is off-screen. Any JavaScript trick is going to report as if the entire viewport is being viewed, so even restricting your query to only the cases where scrolling occurs will not help.