Watching Phone Visitors Live: The Scroll Band
Updated
TL;DR
You can see mobile visitors live in whoisbrowsing as a see-through band drawn over the part of your page they are looking at. Phones and tablets have no mouse pointer to follow, so instead of a cursor you see which slice of the page is on their screen, and it moves as they scroll.
Why a band and not a cursor
On a desktop, the pointer is a good clue to attention, so desktop visitors get a coloured cursor with a fading trail and click ripples. A touchscreen has no pointer. What a phone visitor does have is a viewport: the portion of the page currently on screen. The band is that viewport drawn on your real page.
| Visitor | What you see | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Desktop | Coloured cursor, fading trail, click ripples | Pointer movement tells you where they are looking |
| Phone or tablet | See-through band over the visible part of the page | Touch has no hover; the viewport is the signal |
| Scrolled out of your view | An arrow at the edge | Points toward where they are |
How to read the band
- Where the band sits is what that person can see right now.
- A band that moves down steadily is someone scrolling through the page.
- A band that stays put is someone reading, or someone who has stopped.
- Several bands on the same area show a section many people reach.
- No band near a section you care about suggests few phone visitors scroll that far.
Treat this as a prompt for questions, not a verdict. A still band might be reading or might be a phone on a desk.
What else you know about a phone visitor
The side panel gives each person a line: the page, the source (Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, another site or direct), approximate city, device (phone or tablet), browser and operating system, time on site and pages this visit. See where visitors come from.
Set it up and test on your own phone
<script src="https://live.whoisbrowsing.com/s.js" data-site="YOUR_SITE_ID" defer></script>
- Add the tag and open your site on a desktop with the live view.
- On your phone, open your site in a private window (Safari private or Chrome Incognito), because your regular browser is not counted.
- Scroll on the phone and watch the band move on your desktop.
Each website is separate, so use the same domain on both devices; www. and the bare domain are one website, but localhost is a different one. No account needed to try: /try.
If the band does not appear
- Same website on both devices? Open the same domain on the phone that you are watching on the desktop.
www.and the bare domain count as one website;localhostdoes not, and a phone usually cannot reach your computer's localhost anyway. - Private window on the phone? Your regular browser is never counted, so use Safari private or Chrome Incognito.
- Global Privacy Control on the phone? Visitors from the EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland, and browsers with Global Privacy Control, are never shown.
- Is the phone's part of the page in your view? If not, look for the arrow at the edge of your screen and scroll toward it.
Why it is useful
Mobile layouts often differ from desktop ones. Watching phone visitors lets you check things like whether a call to action is reached before people leave, or whether a long section loses them. It is quick feedback on a layout change.
Privacy
Your visitors' browsers send the page, pointer position, clicks, scroll, device type, source, browser and operating system, and time on site. Never keystrokes, form values or page text. Nothing about your visitors is stored on our servers. No cookies on your visitors. Visitors from the EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland, and browsers with Global Privacy Control, are never shown. See privacy; this is not legal advice.
When whoisbrowsing is not the right tool
It shows which part of the page a phone visitor is viewing, and it keeps no recordings or heatmaps over time. To review how phone users behaved last week, or see tap heatmaps, use a session-replay tool such as Microsoft Clarity or Contentsquare (which Hotjar is now part of). For how the live view is built, see how it works and live cursor tracking.
Common questions
Why can't I see a finger? Touch has no hover, so there is no pointer to follow before a tap. The visible part of the page is the reliable signal.
Does a tablet look the same as a phone? Tablets are shown the same way, as a band over the part of the page in view.
What if a mobile visitor scrolls past my screen? An arrow at the edge of your view points toward them.
Does it slow my mobile pages? The script is under 4 KB gzipped and loads with defer, so it stays small and out of the way.