Microsoft Clarity Review

What is Clarity?

Clarity is a behaviour analytics tool from Microsoft. Microsoft Clarity is totally free and comes packed full of really useful tools and features you’d normally have to pay a premium for. 

Key features include:

• Click heat maps
• Scroll tracking
• Screen recordings

In their own words…”Clarity is a free, easy-to-use tool that captures how real people actually use your site. Setup is easy and you’ll start getting data in minutes.”

How easy is it to install Clarity?

Installing Clarity on your website is very easy and Microsoft have provided a number of different options across numerous platforms.

There are plugins/widgets available for the likes of WordPress, Wix, Shopify, Squarespace and Weebly.

Installation is also super easy if you use a tag manager like Google Tag Manager with a dedicated process.

Alternatively you can copy the tracking and paste it into theelement of your site or app.

Once the code is added to your site you’ll start to see data in a couple of hours.

Getting started with Clarity

The Clarity dashboard is simple, clean and easy to navigate. The primary tools are recordings and heatmaps.

Connecting Google Analytics data enables you to bring in your top pages, device types, sources of traffic and countries and then view their heatmaps and recordings.

Let’s take a look at the reports available in Clarity.

Recording sessions

I’ve always found grinding my way through hundreds of screen recordings a pain, but Clarity’s filters make it easy to remove the bounces or non-engaged traffic.

The recordings shows you how people interact with your content, highlighting clicks and scrolls. 

You can drill down further in to each recording to see dead clicks, location, OS etc.

If you’re concerned about recording sensitive information, you can specify how aggressively Clarity should mask text to stop it being sent to their server.

Click heatmaps

The classic click heatmap, highlighting the popular parts of your page where people…click. 

Clarity’s heatmaps let you drill down further in to what type of click it was:

• Dead clicks
• Rage clicks
• First clicks
• Last clicks

Scroll heatmaps

Based on your filters. the scroll heatmap shows you how far down the page your visitors get before leaving the page. 

This is always an eye opening report, and you’ll often find that compelling sales copy you agonised over for hours only sees 30% of people reach it.

Filers and segments

Clarity has numerous ‘filters’ you can apply to a report to drill down further. Options include:

• Device category
• Browser
• Operating system
• Country
• User actions
• Page scroll depth
• Goals reached/didn’t reach
• Entry, exit and visited URL
• Referring site
• Session duration
• and much more!

To save running through and selecting the same filters every time, you can save combinations as ‘segments’ to report on again.

My only gripe is the default reporting timeframe is 3 days, which isn’t long enough to get insightful data for all but the largest of websites. 

It’s a simple edit to increase the timeframe but get’s annoying having to do it for each report.

Community and support

Being free, there’s isn’t any human support for Clarity however there is a lot of documentation to read up on. You can follow the latest feature releases on the Clarity blog.

Final thoughts

I’m a huge fan of Clarity, I think it’s a great bit of kit made even more so being free. If I were the likes of HotJar I would be very worried. 

If you have the time and the inclination to act on the data being generated, I highly recommend you add this to your site.