In our recent webinar, Microsoft Clarity Product Manager, Colin Lee, shared expert tips on using AI-powered analytics to boost user engagement and conversions in 2025. Read the full blog to discover key strategies for optimizing visitor behavior and your buyer funnel!
Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes
Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, Business Strategists, Microsoft Partner Organizations
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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