Creating a website is hard work. This is true even when using a CMS system like WordPress or a SaaS-based platform like Wix or Squarespace instead of building your site from scratch. You can still end up spending weeks or months designing your site’s layout, aggregating graphic media, and wordsmithing your written content.
But once your site is live, how can you be sure that your users are having a good experience? You want to have a simple and frictionless user experience on your website in order to drive more conversion for your business or more readership for your blog. You want to provide an intuitive and hassle-free experience to your users so as to boost your customers’ trust.
Microsoft has made Clarity, a free state-of-the-art behavioral analytics tool, for you.
It’s possible to get started with Clarity in under 5 minutes so you can see how your users are traversing your website, what clicks for them, and what does not work well for them. We think that once you’ve tried it, you’ll see for yourself how it expands your understanding of your own website.
We’ve written this blog post to give you some reasons why we think Clarity is the right behavioral analytics tool for you.
10. Simple and Easy to Use
We’ve designed Clarity to be as easy as possible to set up and use because we know you’ve already put in a ton of work building your site and you shouldn’t need to learn to use a complicated new system just to understand user behavior. There is little to no adoption time needed or steep learning curve to be had, Clarity is built to be used by anyone and everyone no matter your experience or level of expertise. In as little as five minutes, once you’ve created a project and grabbed your JavaScript snippet, you literally just put it in the <head> section of your website’s HTML or your tag manager of choice. Then you can go back to Clarity to watch recordings, look at heatmaps, and get insights from the dashboard. That’s really it; that’s all the work needed in order to use Clarity.
9. Provide important answers about your website/business, even without asking for them
Through the use of recordings and heatmaps, the insights that they provide help identify gaps and opportunities within a website to lead change requests or even tests that are being done by the different teams and drive business insights. Often, customers are often short in words to describe their issues or don’t have the technical know-how to share a good overview, so it saves time from both sides when you can see a recording of a user’s session or a heatmap of what part of the site they have interacted with and get the answers you need through these different insights.
8. Clarity is the perfect complement to Google Analytics (GA)
Traffic data is invaluable, and Google Analytics (GA) is probably something you should put on your website. GA can tell you all sorts of important things about your site like which pages are getting more traffic, which pages people are spending the most and least amounts of time on, and even what other websites people are coming from and leaving to.
Traffic data is necessary to get a 10,000-foot view of your website, but when you want to discover why a certain stat is where it is, things get trickier. Clarity is meant to be used in this situation and in conjunction with traffic data to tell you why your traffic stats are where they are. Clarity gives you the information to actually understand your traffic trends. Google analytics helps in terms of page views, click events, user flows, etc. While Clarity helps to generate heatmaps and shows you what the user is doing exactly on each and every page.
Here’s an analogy: If GA gives you a letter grade on a test in school, Clarity provides detailed explanations of which answers you got right and which ones you got wrong. If your goal is to do better, you need to know both the how and the why. As you can see, both types of information, the letter score and the detailed breakdown of your answers are important.
7. Lightweight integration
Clarity was built to be as lightweight as possible in order to not cause any performance issues to your site. With it being built as-so, we also provide several integrations that one can utilize with Clarity. Not only do we have integrations with Google Analytics but we also have other integrations with WordPress, Wix and Shopify to name a few.
6. No sampling and no limits on volume of traffic
It doesn’t matter if your site gets 5 visitors a day or 500,000. Clarity can handle the highest traffic sites on the web and we don’t sample sessions. Clarity records data from every single visit to your page and we don’t place any limits on the amount of traffic that is allowed per project. Your dashboard and heatmaps reflect data from all sessions that we get proper signals for.
See why Clarity is the right tool for your site!
Leverage our insights and data to turn your visitors into customers!
5. Always On
Once you add Clarity to your site, just after a few minutes data will start to flow into the dashboard and provide you with copious amounts of actionable information. Clarity is “always on” meaning it is constantly gathering data in near-real time so that you can see user behavior as it is happening on your site and make changes or adjustments to your site accordingly. With this “always on” mentality, we are also receiving feedback from users and working to improve our end product so that it has the proper tools and functionality that you want to see.
4. Make actionable business decisions by looking at user behaviors
Through recordings, viewing click maps and watching frustration errors, Clarity allows for customers to make strong business decisions by watching and reacting to user behaviors. Clarity shows every action and step that a user takes across their journey and, in doing so, provides the site owner visibility into what actions or decisions need to be made to improve or enhance the site. Clarity can be used in the case of debugging and/or testing, improving site metrics through insights and the ability to grow your site from the actionable decisions that are made from the end user behaviors.
3. Easily identify potential customers and their journey
With Clarity you can derive new insights in various ways. For example, by looking at the recordings for dead clicks, rage clicks and other user issues you are able to understand the challenges that the user is facing while navigating your website. On the other hand, through the use of click maps and other heatmaps you can identify potential customers and their journey by determining what part of the site they enter in at and most interact with. You are able to search specific customer segments and define key business metrics and KPIs—allowing you to best optimize your site for a positive user journey. Knowing how and where your user interacts most on your page gives you another level of on-page content and call-to-action optimization. The goal is to delight customers and with the data Clarity provides, it makes this a very seamless possibility with your site.
2. Visually provides in-depth insight into your visitor’s journey
While the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is a cliché, it’s an accurate one. Arguably the coolest thing about Clarity is that it doesn’t just tell you what is going on with your site, it shows you what is going on with your site. It turns analytics into UX analytics providing a very in depth and detailed visual representation of data.
The visual nature of both heatmaps and session recordings allow a huge amount of information to be conveyed in a very small package and short amount of time. Instead of wondering whether JavaScript errors on your site have any material impact on its usability, you can go look. Instead of wondering if your new feature is getting used, you can go look. And so on.
Simply put, instead of piecing together disparate pieces of information to form guesses about user behavior, you can go look at how users are actually behaving. There is no better way to look at your website than from the perspective of your users. Clarity gives you this perspective, for free.
1. Best bang for your buck
Personal use of Clarity is free. Business use of Clarity is free. All use of Clarity is completely free and we’re going to keep it that way. There are no hidden fees, no “freemium” payment structures, no trial periods. There are only free heatmaps and free session recordings for anyone and everyone with a website.
We’re taking this extremely powerful technology (that all of our competitors charge for), and we’re democratizing it. We want everyone to have access to these tools that leading enterprises have used for years to guide the direction of their websites. We want to empower you to create the best user experience you can using a world-class product like Clarity.
We hope this list gives you some ideas for how you can use Microsoft Clarity to ensure the best possible experience for your site’s users. Visit https://clarity.microsoft.com and sign up today.