Powerful NEW Website Behavior Analytics: Microsoft Clarity

Summary:

Microsoft Clarity is a free powerful tool that provides website behavior analytics.

Powerful NEW Website Behavior Analytics: Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is a free powerful tool that provides website behavior analytics.

Powerful User Behavior Analytics Tool: Microsoft Clarity

Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes 

Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, Business Strategists, Microsoft Partner Organizations

The current business scenario has forced a lot of enterprises to move away from the brick-and-mortar approach and embrace online means. Businesses need a firm marketing strategy and a healthy website to ensure the success of their products and services. Taking cognizance of these challenges, Microsoft has been addressing the woes of remote work with its many tools. Likewise, Microsoft recently launched Clarity to make website management a breeze for developers and non-developers alike.

What is Microsoft Clarity?

An analytics tool that empowers website managers to make educated decisions on website modifications. It is a FREE platform that keeps decision-makers notified of their website’s performance and engagement. The platform acts as a set of tools that point at areas of improvement and changes that need to be made to improve website performance.

Microsoft Clarity observes website visitors and tracks user behavior across your website. You can access all this information through a dashboard that allows website managers to view behavioral patterns of various audience segments.

The tool comes with some remarkable capabilities that can help you improve your website performance with powerful insights. 

HOW TO LEVERAGE MICROSOFT CLARITY FOR YOUR WEBSITE

Use Session Playbacks to Track User Behavior

You can view session activity for each website visitor and track their engagement throughout the website. From mouse movements to scrolling to clicks, everything is recorded. So no more guesswork and anticipating how your users are behaving on the website, you can now see for yourself. 

microsoft clarity session playbacks
Image: Website user recordings, Session Playbacks, in Microsoft Clarity

There are extraordinary filtering capabilities that come with session playbacks. Microsoft has implemented machine learning to discover novel patterns in session recordings like “rage clicks”, “dead clicks”, and “excessive scrolling”. These patterns can be used as classifications to filter out what you want to see. This is extremely useful for determining the user interface performance. 

How to Best Utilize Session Playbacks

Session Playbacks are of use to website operators, webmasters, and User Experience (UX) consultants to identify and repair design shortcomings. You get to see which part of your website runs smoothly and which bits are causing issues for your visitors. Moreover, developers can utilize it during the development and testing phase of the website too. Therefore, this feature enables you to redesign your website based on visitor interactions.

Get a Performance Overview with Clarity’s Dashboard

Analyzing website usage is a common practice for understanding your web traffic. Microsoft Clarity dashboard provides data such as session counts, total users, page view details, bounce rate, scroll depth, etc. You can even view javascript errors and monitor the popular pages across the website.

microsoft clarity dashboard
Image: Microsoft Clarity Analytics Dashboard

These insights help understand user scrolling patterns like they may be doing so in search of particular information or if they are clicking on areas they expect to be hyperlinked.

What does the Microsoft Clarity Dashboard offer?

The dashboard is a quick way to glance over the performance of your website. Decision-makers can make the most of it by getting a comprehensive summary. It is an efficient tool to track and report developments across the website and ensure that any efforts being made on your part are giving the desired results. Based on this, you can make informed changes to your website and boost its engagement with the target audience.

Learn How Users Interact with Your Content

Tracking user interaction is one of the best ways to identify areas of improvement for your website. Microsoft brings the heatmap feature to Clarity that follows visitor movement, empowering you to see where users scrolled and clicked, and monitor the entire navigation lifecycle. This capability is extremely useful for visual people as they can see what content is important to users and make note of whether or not users are getting desired information.

microsoft clarity heatmap view
Image: Microsoft Clarity Heatmaps Tracking Content Interaction

Click-maps and scroll-maps are easy to use and showcase frequently interacted areas on a webpage. While playbacks show the journey of a single user, heatmaps give you insight into aggregated interaction.

Structure Your Website with Heatmap Insights

The Microsoft Clarity Heatmaps allow you to see if the areas of interaction depict the information you want to be accessed most by users, if that’s not the case, then you need to rethink and modify the layout of the page so that visitors are aligned with the portions you want them to. For example, if not enough people are scrolling to the bottom of the page, then maybe you could shorten the length of the page or move more valuable information to the top. Heatmaps also help analyze call-to-action placement on your website and observe if the kind of language and layout you use is conducive to conversions. Therefore, data-driven inputs can be provided to make any necessary design changes to the website that facilitates better user experience and drives conversion.

Does Microsoft Clarity Replace Other Website Analytics Tools?

Microsoft Clarity is not just about the three core capabilities, there is so much more to this tool through its filtering and custom tag capabilities. You can filter down data and analyze specific criteria. For example, taking a look at heatmaps for pages that have excessive scrolling or high rage clicks, to identify pain points that can be improved upon. Since Google Analytics discontinued Heatmaps in 2017, Clarity is here to fill the gap along with some other overlapping metrics. But, Google Analytics has a vast expanse of metrics on acquisition and conversion, that cannot be replaced by Clarity.

Microsoft Clarity features overlap with several other tools as well that come at a monthly fee. Although software like Crazy Egg, HotJar, and Lucky Orange, offer similar insights at a cost, they provide additional features too. Crazy Egg covers referral source tracking, keyword tracking, and several A/B testing capabilities. HotJar on the other hand has extensive customer experience and feedback features that Clarity lacks. So far, Luck Orange is somewhat closest to Microsoft Clarity’s areas of expertise. 

However, Microsoft Clarity has its advantages, even though the above-named tools offer free trials, you can get a lot of those powerful insights on Microsoft Clarity for free! Moreover, it has the ability to combine different filters allowing you to narrow down on user behavior and in turn suggest modifications to simplify user experience across the website. You can even custom code tags and fire them across pages to get specific metrics.

*BONUS* Microsoft Clarity can be used by anyone, irrespective of the size of their website and traffic since there are no caps on traffic. Microsoft Clarity can support the largest of websites and can process large amounts of data without getting in the way of your website’s performance. 

Which Analytics Software is Best for You?

Analytics is vital for monitoring a website’s performance, to make sure that you are taking all actionable steps to drive traffic and conversion, make use of a combination of software. In this manner, you not only cover all your bases but also make data-driven decisions. For example, a combination of Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity gives both valuable audience metrics and user experience insights, allowing you to make informed decisions about online marketing efforts and design. At Maven Collective Marketing, we promise measurable results and would love to help you in your marketing initiatives. If you would like to know more about using analytics tools to boost the marketing strategy for your business, get in touch with us!

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