Imagine having a crystal ball that reveals how visitors interact with your website. Well, with Microsoft Clarity, that crystal ball is closer than ever. If you’re looking for a free analytics tool that provides in-depth insights into your website users, usage statistics, heatmaps, and session recordings, Microsoft Clarity is worth considering. 

Although it shares similarities with Google Analytics and Hotjar, it brings unique features to the table. But what is Microsoft Clarity, and how can it help your business? In this article, ClickGUARD will explore this free user behavior analytics tool.

What Is Microsoft Clarity?

While traditional analytics tools share valuable data on clicks and page views, they often leave a crucial piece of the puzzle missing: the user journey itself. Here’s where Microsoft Clarity steps in. Launched in 2018, it is a free user behavior analytics tool designed to give businesses a deeper understanding of how visitors interact with their websites. 

It goes beyond the basic click by capturing session recordings, revealing the entire user journey – from the moment a visitor lands on your homepage to the moment they leave. These recordings include mouse movements, clicks, and scrolling behavior, offering incredible insights into user experience.

Microsoft Clarity’s Benefits: Why Use It

By providing this in-depth user journey data, Microsoft Clarity empowers businesses to:

  • Identify and address usability issues: By pinpointing areas where users struggle, businesses can optimize their website layout, navigation, and content for a smoother user experience. This can lead to increased conversions and customer satisfaction.
  • Personalize the user experience: Understanding user behavior allows businesses to tailor their website experience to different user segments. This can involve personalizing content recommendations, product suggestions, or CTA buttons based on user behavior patterns.
  • Boost marketing campaign effectiveness: Microsoft Clarity’s insights can be used to analyze marketing campaigns’ effectiveness. Businesses can see how users interact with landing pages and identify any elements that might be getting in the way of successful conversions.

Microsoft Clarity Features

Microsoft Clarity offers three key features that provide deep insights into user behavior and website performance:

1. Session Recordings

Microsoft Clarity records all user sessions on your website, capturing every mouse movement, scroll, and click. This feature allows you to view recordings of user sessions and check exactly how visitors interact with your site, helping identify usability issues and understand user behavior in detail. It detects where users encounter problems, such as struggling with navigation or failing to find key information, giving you the chance to improve website design and functionality. 

2. Click Maps and Heatmaps

Microsoft Clarity provides details on user interactions through click maps and heatmaps. 

Click maps show where users are clicking on your webpage, highlighting popular and ignored areas. This helps you understand which elements attract attention and which may need repositioning. 

Heatmaps display the intensity of user interactions, indicating the most and least engaging parts of your webpage. Heatmaps can include:

  • Scroll Maps: View how far down the page users are scrolling, helping you determine if important content is being missed.
  • Click Heatmaps: Reveal areas with the highest concentration of clicks, allowing you to optimize CTA placements.
  • Attention Maps: Show which sections of your page users spend the most time on, offering insights into content effectiveness.

3. Filtering and Custom Tags

Microsoft Clarity’s custom filters sort and segment data based on country, device type, browser, operating system, timeframe, and other parameters. This helps understand user behavior across different demographics and conditions. 

The custom tags feature allows to tag specific events or user actions to get more granular data. For example, you can tag interactions with key elements like buttons or forms to analyze their performance. You can also use filters to identify patterns and anomalies in user behavior, such as repeated clicks on non-responsive elements (rage clicks) or unexpected navigation paths.

Microsoft Clarity vs Google Analytics

While Microsoft Clarity provides many valuable insights, it’s not a full-featured primary analytics tool. However, it seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics, allowing you to use both side-by-side. Setting up a system where Microsoft Clarity shares information with Google Analytics is straightforward and can give you the best of both worlds. Your dashboard will show which session recordings correspond with Google Analytics sessions, providing comprehensive insights.

Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar both offer heatmaps and session recordings, but Clarity provides a broader overview of data and information related to “rage clicks”. While each tool serves its purpose, integrating them isn’t straightforward without custom coding. Clarity handles tagging and custom events similarly to Hotjar, allowing you to apply the same filters and tagging methods.

Powerful Integrations

Microsoft Clarity also works as a hub for connecting with various platforms and tools, allowing you to expand its capabilities and unlock even deeper insights into user behavior. With integrations for popular tools like Google Analytics, AB Tasty, Kameleoon, and Optimizely, you can:

  • View recordings and heatmaps for your Google Analytics segments and discover ways to improve your GA goals.
  • Combine Kameleoon’s A/B testing feature and personalization platform with Microsoft Clarity for valuable insights.
  • Watch session recordings for Optimizely experiments and use heatmaps to understand variations.

But that’s not all! The list of integrations extends to Zapier, HubSpot, Bubble, AB Tasty, ClickFunnels, Gatsby, Shopify, WordPress, and more. 

Microsoft Clarity for Mobile Devices

You can also use Microsoft Clarity within your mobile applications across Android, React Native, Cordova, Ionic, and iOS platforms. Clarity offers robust analytics tailored to enhance user experiences while following privacy standards like GDPR and CCPA. Designed for seamless integration, it ensures minimal impact on app performance, optimizing load times and bandwidth usage to keep a smooth operation without compromising on data insights.

Its precise session replay technology accurately recreates mobile user journeys, providing high-fidelity playback across diverse device sizes and screen resolutions. View user behavior instantly through detailed heatmaps that aggregate data from every session, allowing you to analyze app usage patterns. With customizable filters and tools, developers can efficiently identify and solve issues, ensuring enhanced app functionality and user engagement.

Check out the Microsoft Clarity official site to learn more about its features. To know more about how to get actual data that offers insight into user behavior and how to collect it effectively, contact our ClickGUARD experts and request a demo or start a free trial.