Microsoft Clarity – The Definitive Guide

I know I’m late to discovering this tool, but for anyone else out that that hasn’t heard of it I just had to do a post! Today, you’ll learn all about Microsoft Clarity.

Before we start, you can also read this on Medium.com.

Odds are that a completely free website monitoring and analytics tool is something you’re looking for. Especially if you have a website that you or your business relies on to provide an excellent first impression to potential clients.

Microsoft Clarity often gets confused with offerings like Google Analytics, and even has paid alternatives like HotJar.

Microsoft Clarity is a completely free data-driven insight tools for websites. Providing heat-maps, user journeys and behavioural analytics specially for you

Say you wanted to see and learn how potential customers interact with your site. You might do this because people are adding products to the basket, but not checking out.

Then you can use Microsoft Clarity to “record” these sessions to find out exactly what might have gone wrong. Super useful to try and earned a couple more percentage in client conversions.

Microsoft Clarity insights are extremely underused, almost like it’s an industry secret that no one wants to share. It’s awesome, and it collects information on topics such as:

• Improving website layout
• Enhanced marketing efforts
• User journeys and user experience

Clarity offers a ton of features, but the ones you’re likely most interested in are:

• Heatmaps – These allow you to visually see where users have clicked, scrolled and otherwise interacted with your website. This has saved me in the past as it’s pointed out some glaring issues with a website. Such as: a button not linking correctly or a broken page format

• Session Recordings – This is kind of self explanatory. Clarity allows session recordings to take place so that you can see how a user interacts with your website in real-time. For anyone concerned with security, it obviously doesn’t record any billing info or other sensitive info during the session.

• User Paths – User paths can help you identify navigational issues with your website and better optimised how pages can be found.
• Funnel Analysis – Super easy funnel analysis can quickly tell you why people haven’t signed up to your mailing list or completely a registration form. Maybe they completed it but the form crash?
• Custom Events – Similar to tool like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, you can track specific user actions. For example: if you wanted to track how often users clicked a certain button, this would enable you to do that.
• Rage Click/Exits – This occurs when a user repeatedly clicks in the same area/element out of frustration. Say a user entered their details into a sign up form, but the sign up form did nothing when they clicked on the little “Submit” button. Then they might click the button a bunch out of frustration and ultimately just leave your website.

Well there are a bunch of use cases, from IT to online stores Microsoft Clarity has something to offer everyone. Since it’s free and very lightweight, tiny teams and blogs are also using it to gain insights into their own websites.

Say you’ve had a support ticket logged stating that someone tried to click a link on your website, but nothing happened. How on Earth can you validate what they are saying? You might try the link yourself and it works fine…

Here comes the Screen Recording capabilities of Microsoft Clarity, you can easily load up past recordings and pin point exactly what went wrong in that exact user experience.

Getting a bunch of “Added To Carts” but a woeful number of “Success Checkout?”. Then you could be encountering issues on your website without even knowing it.

You could have a broken checkout experience preventing users from making a purchase. Or broken formatting that scares potential customers away.

So you’ve built a super cool website and you love it, but you keep getting submitting that the text is completely unreadable.

You look for their Screen Recording and find nothing is broken and everything looks fine. You then use the accessibility tools and find that the background and text colour combinations are very hard to read for people who are colour blind.

This allows you to quickly identify the cause and fix it ASAP.

Both of these services provide the same, or nearly the same, features and capabilities.

The main difference for me is cost. Whilst Microsoft Clarity is completely free, Hotjar does have a free plan but quickly can become expensive if you need for features.

It can also be said that Hotjar offers better heatmaps than Clarity. These include scroll heatmaps and attention heatmaps.

Hotjar also limits the amount of screen recordings you can have on the free tier, whilst Microsoft Clarity allows for unlimited recordings.

Both tools have extensive integration options for tools like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Setting up Microsoft Clarity is as simple as signing up, and adding your website.

If you already use the Google Search Console, then signing up is super simple. I’d estimate it only took me 5 minutes to have everything setup.

After signing up, you’ll be greeted with a similar screen to this asking for your website’s information:

All that was left was to wait for data to flow into Clarity before results could be generated.

Thanks for reading, Enjoy! 🎉