Microsoft Clarity is a free analytics tool with a focus on user behaviour to help you make sense of how users are interacting with your website features. The easy to use platform provides analysis on four main areas of your website – session playbacks, heatmaps, insights and proven scalability in a clear, visual format to help you to improve your website’s performance.
Microsoft Clarity was created to make user analytics easy and give people the benefit of visual representations of user experience (UX) data to help to crystalise exactly why key metrics like ‘bounce rate’ and ‘time on page’ are currently the way they are and what you should look to refine. Your website is there to convert people in some way and UX data is key to optimising this.
So, why should you use Microsoft Clarity?
It’s Free!
You can’t beat a freebie, and with the options Microsoft Clarity offers, we think it’s a tool you should definitely be checking out and having a play around with whilst it is a free service.
Easy to use and setup
With a lot of analytics platforms, the process of setting them up to your site can be tricky. However, with Microsoft Clarity, it is super simple to get up and running and the analytics user interface makes analysing data a breeze. A big plus is that it’s designed to have a low impact on page load speeds so you can be collecting data without any detrimental effects.
You can install this easily using the following steps:
- Select your project in Microsoft Clarity. (If you haven’t added your website yet you’ll be able to search for how to get started adding your project.)
- In ‘Setup’, copy the Clarity tracking code
- Paste this tracking code into the <head> section of your website/webapp
- You can add the same code into multiple subdomains of your website.
- There are also specific guides for installing Clarity on third party websites such as Squarespace, Woocommere and WordPress.
The Data (Obviously!)
Microsoft Clarity seems to take some of the best features out there from the likes of Google Analytics and HotJar and put them in an accessible format. Is this enough to completely replace other analytics platforms? Currently, we don’t think so. Primarily it is a session recording tool and it only offers a basic level of analysis across a handful of areas. It’s a great starting point for those who haven’t done any previous analysis or are happy with very top level data, but for those wanting to drill deeper into their data, it’s not a replacement for something like Google Analytics. We do like what Microsoft are offering here, especially as a free tool, but it really depends on what you’re looking to achieve as to how useful you’ll find it.
It has a few features you might not have seen before, including special reports that dig into when customers may have been confused or annoyed by a page feature and you can view data on ‘rage clicks’ and ‘excessive scrolling’,providing you with clever insight to where your site is letting users down.
Real time data processing and unlimited data!
With Microsoft Clarity, it works near real time, therefore you won’t have to wait for data like with other platforms which is a positive and separates from its counterparts. Also, the data is unlimited, meaning there are no site or traffic limits, meaning you can leave Clarity on, and you won’t have to worry about sessions not being recorded or data being missed, which is another strong advantage.
The connection to Google Analytics
Good things come together in pairs, right? You can combine the visual learning behaviour data of Clarity and the metric behaviour data of Google Analytics to produce a very strong data set for your website. This is possible because Microsoft Clarity uses a custom dimension to pass session recording URLs into Google Analytics.
As a free tool we really rate this and it allows website managers to get a decent level of insight without worrying about funding paid-for tools. After learning what Microsoft Clarity is and about some of its benefits, will your business give it a go?
