Maybe you’ve heard colleagues or industry experts talk about Microsoft Clarity. But what is it and how does it work?
Microsoft Clarity is a unique user behavior and website debugging analysis tool.
What Clarity does is provide insights into how users interact with a website, making it quite different from other analytics tools, including Google Analytics.
Learn about its various features, limitations, why it’s not a Google Analytics competitor, and how to get the most out of Microsoft Clarity here.
User Experience Analysis
Other analytics tools focus on things like reporting traffic, Key words, page popularity, etc.
Microsoft Clarity focuses on user experience to help publishers gain insight into how users interact with their sites.
User behavior data helps publishers identify areas for improvement, spot page errors, gain insights into conversions, and many other useful insights.
Microsoft Clarity even provides machine learning and deep AI components behind the scenes to automatically generate insights based on patterns created by website user behavior. It provides these insights as recommendations for further investigation and follow-up.
With Clarity, publishers can see User Participation Model in different parts of each page, and the user session can be played back to see how the user interacts with the web page.
Over 25 filters make it easy to zero in on user pain points to debug site issues or discover effective ways to replicate the experience on other pages.
All of these insights are delivered in near real-time by Microsoft Clarity.
Microsoft Clarity and Google Analytics
If you already have Google Analytics, you may be wondering if you need Microsoft Clarity. Some argue that because they are both analytics services, there may be overlap between the two.
However, there really is no comparison between Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity because they do very different things.
Google Analytics provides insight Enter traffic mode.
Microsoft Clarity provides actionable insights into how users interact with web pages.
Microsoft Clarity is not a competitor to Google Analytics.Rather, it’s actually a complement to Google Analytics, so much so You can connect Google Analytics to Clarity And use imported data to gain more insights into user behavior.
Privacy Compliance
Although Microsoft Clarity tracks user behavior on the site, Clarity is fully compliant with European GDPR and California CCPA privacy requirements.
Impact of Microsoft Clarity on Page Speed
Microsoft Clarity’s JavaScript is loaded asynchronously and, according to Microsoft, doesn’t affect website performance.
“Visitors to your site won’t experience any difference in site speed or performance. Clarity JavaScript is asynchronous, so it doesn’t slow down page load times.”
Does Microsoft Clarity have traffic restrictions?
There is no limit to the amount of traffic that Clarity can measure.
Unlike other heatmap and analytics tools that impose traffic throttling on the free versions of their tools, Microsoft doesn’t impose throttling based on traffic.
According to Microsoft:
“There is absolutely no limit to the number of websites per account. Clarity can scale to support the largest websites.
Clarity processes over 1 petabyte of data per month from over 100 million users. Also, these sites have no traffic restrictions. “
Microsoft Clarity Features
The key features of Microsoft Clarity are:
- Clarity heatmap.
- Session records.
- Clear insights.
Clarity Heatmap
Clarity Heatmaps provides two types of heatmap data:
1. Click on the heatmap
Click on the heatmap:
- Shows engagement in different parts of the web page.
- Show where people clicked (including non-clickable page elements).
- And provide an idea of which page elements are important to most website visitors.
Click heatmap data can be displayed for a single page or a group of pages.
This data can be further refined and segmented using filters to gain insight into how different users click on page elements.
2. Scrolling heatmaps
Scrolling heatmaps show how far users have scrolled on a web page. As with all other Clarity features, filters can be applied to scroll heatmaps to see how different users scroll the page – for example by device.
Scrolling heatmap data is useful because it shows how far a user scrolled before hitting a call to action.
Scrolling heatmaps can also help identify if users are missing a call to action or important information.
If users don’t reach something and exit the site without converting, scrolling heatmap data will show the point in time when users abandon on your site.
Actionable Heatmap Data
Clarity heatmaps can be segmented by filters such as traffic source, device, and browser to identify patterns displayed by different visitors.
Heatmap data helps debug web page issues by identifying where users click, better understand user experience, and identify where users stay.
Additionally, it can help increase conversions by showing where users are abandoning or if a call to action scrolls past without stimulating a click.
In my opinion, the most important quality of the Clarity Heatmaps feature is to help improve conversion rates, as most websites have a conversion action they want their users to complete, whether it’s clicking an ad, buying a product, clicking an affiliate link, or signing up for a newsletter.
Clarity heatmaps help debug conversion issues and improve them.
The information in Clarity Heatmaps can also be shared with other people in your company and customers.
The Clarity Heatmap feature has no traffic restrictions, making it an attractive feature for publishers with a lot of traffic and those just starting out.
Session recording
Clarity Session Recording is a feature that records and replays a user’s journey through a website. It shows how users interact with site navigation, calls to action, search functionality, and other page elements.
Session records show publishers whether site navigation and links are helping users find what they’re looking for, and can also show which page factors aren’t working, such as calls to action.
Screenshot of user session timeline, October 2020Session recording can identify angry clicks, invalid clicks, snapbacks, and overscrolling.
angry click
Angry clicks indicate that certain areas of a web page may not be interactive when the user expects them to. A characteristic of a typical angry click when a user repeatedly clicks on a web page element such as a link, button, or image.
For example, if the link doesn’t work because the page isn’t fully loaded, or if the image looks like a link but isn’t a link at all. Clarity highlights angry clicks to point out areas of the user experience that indicate user frustration with a page.
dead click
Dead clicks occur when an interactive element doesn’t respond within a reasonable amount of time, or doesn’t respond at all.
It’s also a sign of user frustration.
fast back
A quick return is when a user clicks away from your site to another site but then returns.
Microsoft said it would update this data point to include the origin so that when a user clicks from one page on one site to another on the same site, and then back to the original page, it will be recorded, saying Not happy with their page. Click to.
overscroll
Session records can also reveal what Microsoft calls “overscrolling.”
Overscrolling is when Clarity detects that website visitors scroll up and down in an unusual pattern, which indicates a poor user experience.
This data point may indicate that users are not finding what they expected to find, and may otherwise frustrate site visitors enough to cause them to leave the site.
Clarity Session Recordings provides valuable insights that help increase sales, affiliate clicks, ad clicks and website visitor satisfaction.
A useful feature of Session Recordings is that these data points can be segmented by browser, activity, and 23 other filters.
Clarity Session logging is an effective way to gain insight into user behavior and improve web page and website performance.
Screenshot of the Recording Dashboard, October 2020The session timeline, shown in the screenshot above, is like a movie where the user interacts with the page. Display cursor movement.
The session panel on the left allows publishers to filter data to isolate various data types.
Individual sessions seen in the box can be selected and viewed.
Additionally, the “Filter” button at the top can be clicked to select a large number of data types, such as user devices, etc.
Clicking the “Filter” button generates the entire filter web page.
To save space and provide close-ups, I cut the filter page in half, left and right.
Screenshots to the left and right of the filter, October 2020clear insights
Microsoft Clarity Insights is a feature that applies the power of deep AI and machine learning algorithms to automatically derive actionable insights from the analytics data collected by Clarity.
Screenshot of Insights Dashboard, October 2020Clarity monitors session records with JavaScript errors, wild and invalid clicks, and identifies browsers and groups of users to watch.
Users can save groups for tracking.
The Clarity Insights documentation says:
“Clarity Insights is a set of machine learning (ML)-based filters and recommendations on what’s most important to you.
…with dashboards, you can learn about your users without having to analyze the vast amounts of data that originate from user interactions on your website.
There’s a core question: If Clarity can log every user interaction, how can it display the most important sessions and pages? One solution comes from the Clarity Insights platform.
Clarity Insights relies on Microsoft’s decades of experience in data science and machine learning to identify key trends and patterns in your site activity.
…Providing accurate, accessible and proactive analytics is an essential feature of Clarity. “
Close-up screenshot of Microsoft Clarity Insights dashboard, October 2020Add Microsoft Clarity Analytics to your stack
A big question many people face is whether they should use Clarity considering they already use another analysis program.
Clarity provides actionable insights for improving website revenue and user experience that many analytics programs don’t.
Clearly, Microsoft Clarity is not a competitor to Google Analytics, but a complement to it.
Therefore, it is arguably inappropriate to compare the two as they both address different problems.
Clarity is a great product because it helps publishers improve conversion rates and sales, as well as the user experience for website visitors.
What Clarity does is help publishers identify flaws in their sites and improve them.
Microsoft Clarity doesn’t have a pricing model – it’s free, no matter how much traffic a website attracts.
The only restriction on Clarity is that Microsoft does not recommend that financial, government, and medical websites join Clarity.
In addition to the above caveats, the answer to the question of whether you should use Microsoft Clarity depends on how important it is to you to improve your revenue and the user experience of your website visitors.
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Featured image: Ollyy/Shutterstock
