What is Brainstorm Force?

Astra is a WordPress theme developed by Brainstorm Force. It’s the most popular third-party theme in the world with over 2.4 million users. It was launched in 2017 to help freelancers, website developers, business owners, and just about anyone build exceptional-looking and high-performing websites quickly and easily. 

In addition to the highly popular Astra theme, some of the other awesome products created by Brainstorm Force include Spectra, Schema Pro, Ultimate Addons, Convert Pro, Cart Flows, and many others.

The mission is simple. Brainstorm Force believes in bringing quality products to the WordPress ecosystem that are usable, useful, affordable, and reliable.

Meet the founder

Sujay Pawar (pictured below) is the CEO and co-founder of Brainstorm Force (the team behind Astra). Additionally, he is a co-investor and advisor at Automattic, the company behind WordPress. You can reach him on Twitter @sujaypawar.

Challenge

Brainstorm Force wanted to provide a search field to help visitors navigate seamlessly, in addition to strategically placing the various links and call to action buttons. They came across two challenges.

The company realized that their search bar caused confusion and made it difficult for visitors to locate what they were looking for. Another challenge was to assist visitors to preview the company’s Starter Templates. Users were struggling to preview the templates even though the mouse hover allowed them to click and view them. Click-through rates were much lower than the company wanted to see.

Starter Templates is an extensive library of pre-built website templates that cover just about any niche and business out there. Over 3.5 million websites were created using these Starter Templates in 2022. 

A major selling point for these templates was that users can import a Starter Template, and have the website ready in a matter of minutes. The library page wasn’t delivering this selling point expected by website visitors.

“We created the Starter Templates page to showcase our pro-quality readymade templates. They are a USP of Astra and we spent a lot of time and resources making them the best they could be. However, the page we were showcasing them on just wasn’t delivering the experience visitors wanted or the conversions we needed.”

Finding a solution

The company used Clarity’s session recordings and heatmaps features to overcome two challenges. The recordings helped Brainstorm Force gain understanding of their designs and templates, and showed areas of improvement they never considered. The features even helped them improve traffic to their templates.

To address the first challenge, the company added a search option to the navigation bar.

With the help of Microsoft Clarity‘s heatmaps, they identified the problem area and added two descriptive call to action buttons when a visitor hovers over each template.

Results

By making these two simple changes, website users were able to better understand how to navigate their website. 

The outcome?

They saw a 10% increase in click engagement for their landing page templates. Starter Templates also saw an immediate 12.17% increase in the number of users viewing them, as shown in the following two images.

Learnings

Ultimately, the company fostered a user-centric mindset and placed themselves in the shoes of their website visitors in order to truly understand the user’s perspective.

Their advice? Businesses need to approach each page and interaction as if they are a brand-new visitor, unfamiliar with the layout and functionalities. By adopting this mindset, they can uncover potential pain points and identify areas that may confuse or frustrate users, which can be very beneficial for business growth and user retention.

Testimonial

“It’s often the little things that matter the most and with Microsoft Clarity, we were able to make those minor tweaks and enhancements that lead to a visible improvement in user experience. From our website visitors being able to navigate easily to an immediate 12.17% increase in click throughs to our Starter Templates, Clarity has brought in immediate results. We are confident that these numbers will continue to increase.”

Sujay Pawar, CEO & Co-founder

What is Scrapingdog?

Scrapingdog delivers powerful and efficient web scraping solutions to a variety of industries. The company aims to enable organizations to tap into essential data for their decision-making processes, market research, and a variety of data-oriented tasks.

Who is Scrapingdog intended for?

Scrapingdog is intended for a wide market, offering scraping APIs to compile job search data on LinkedIn, real estate property data on Zillow, search data on Google, and content insights from Twitter. The 4-tier pricing plan makes it accessible for all business structures, from individuals to enterprise.

Meet the founder

Manthan Koolwal (pictured below) founded Scrapingdog with the vision to simplify and streamline the web scraping process for everyone, with an impressive 12+ years of experience in the field. One of Manthan’s most noteworthy achievements is the successful design and implementation of an API for the railway sector that was later acquired by the Government of India.

Challenge

The team at Scrapingdog noticed a major issue on their website. They had a substantial number of visitors landing on their homepage, but there was a lack of product comprehension from users. Prior to using Microsoft Clarity, Manthan Koolwal and his colleague, Divanshu Khatter, had difficulty identifying roadblocks and opportunities to solve this problem and increase free trial signups.

Finding a solution

They reassessed their product offerings and the messaging in the hero section of their homepage. Recognizing the importance of capturing visitors’ attention and effectively conveying the value of their product, they employed iterative testing and refinements of multiple headlines with the help of Microsoft Clarity’s session recordings feature.

Through this process, they successfully created a new headline that resonated strongly with their website visitors, clearly articulating the benefits and value of their product. The impact of this single change was impressive, as it prompted a significant increase in visitor engagement and conversion. More specifically, the updated headline sparked a surge in free trial sign-ups by 50%.

Learnings

Scrapingdog found Microsoft Clarity to be a valuable tool in detecting issues on their website’s homepage. The insights gained have led to informed decisions and optimization of the site’s performance. The team recognized the value of even the smallest interactions through session recordings, enabling prompt resolution of user concerns and improvement of their browsing experience. The team plans to continue using Microsoft Clarity to uncover new opportunities for growth and optimization.

Testimonial

“Since integrating Microsoft Clarity, it has become an invaluable asset in analyzing user behavior. Its screen recording feature has unveiled previously hidden insights, deeply enriching our understanding of user interactions. Now, every website change is underpinned by robust data analysis from Clarity, transforming our decision-making process from guesswork to precision. It has been a game-changer in our pursuit of user-centric design and data-driven enhancements.”

Manthan Koolwal, Founder of Scrapingdog

What is AIModels.fyi?

AIModels.fyi was founded to provide users with a comprehensive platform to search, filter, and sort AI models for their AI projects. The mission is to assist individuals and organizations in finding the ideal AI model to meet their specific needs.

Who is AIModels.fyi intended for?

AIModels.fyi primarily serves users in the AI industry who are seeking to integrate AI models into their projects. The company goals revolve around driving long, engaged sessions, generating high traffic, and achieving a high mailing list signup rate.

Meet the founder

Mike is the founder of AIModels.fyi. He started the project in March 2023, leveraging his 10+ years of experience in building digital products across diverse industries. He is building the site, writing the code, and managing his marketing 100% independently. You can find him on Twitter, where he shares details about the project as a part of his vision to build in public.

Challenge

Mike faced a significant challenge in understanding user behavior and improving the user experience on the homepage of AlModels.fyi. He lacked a dedicated tool to analyze user behavior and make informed decisions. He had no understanding of what people were doing once they reached his site, beyond some general analytics data about page views. He needed a tool to help reduce his bounce rate from 65% to below 50%, as well as make changes to improve average engagement time above 25 seconds.

Finding a solution

Integrating Microsoft Clarity into the website was a straightforward process. Leveraging Clarity’s heatmaps, session recordings, and rage click and dead link filters, Mike gained deep insights into user behavior on his site. These insights guided his decision-making process and enabled us to enhance our landing page effectively. 

Based on the insights provided by Clarity, he immediately made significant changes to the website. These changes included a redesign of the homepage, focusing on shortening the page and implementing best practices for displaying data on mobile devices. Mike was also able to redesign several pages that had high bounce rates and surfaced information based on heatmap data to provide value to visitors right away.

Additionally, he addressed issues with the functionality of the website’s “get the emails” button, ensuring it worked correctly and captured more signups by using an embed vs. a multi-step signup process. These changes, driven by insights from Clarity, resulted in a smoother user journey and improved overall functionality.

Mike was impressed by the impact of these changes. The bounce rate plummeted from 65% to 43%, and engagement time increased from 25 seconds to 55 seconds on average.

Learnings

AIModels.fyi’s experience with Microsoft Clarity highlighted its value as a tool for understanding user behavior and optimizing websites. Through Clarity, Mike learned the importance of shortening and redesigning the homepage, optimizing functionality by reducing work for the user, and prioritizing key features such as search and the leader board.

Moving forward, Mike has exciting plans to further enhance AIModels.fyi based on the insights gained from Clarity. He is actively exploring the implementation of an “AI assistant” feature, allowing users to describe their projects and receive AI model recommendations. Additionally, Mike is considering gamification options to increase user engagement and interaction.

In conclusion, Microsoft Clarity played a pivotal role in revamping the landing page of AIModels.fyi. Its ability to provide actionable insights into user behavior empowered the team to make data-driven decisions, resulting in improved user experiences and enhanced performance.

Testimonial

“Microsoft Clarity has been instrumental in optimizing AIModels.fyi. By providing deep insights into user behavior, it empowered me to make data-driven decisions, more than double engagement time, and slash my bounce rates. I highly recommend Clarity to anyone looking to enhance their website’s user experience and drive conversions.”

Mike, CEO of AIModels.fyi

What is Salesmachine?

Salesmachine launched in April 2022 with a simple yet powerful vision: to make demo creation accessible to all through an intuitive no-code platform.

Traditional demo creation tools require technical expertise, limiting their impact for non-technical professionals. Salesmachine solves this with a Chrome extension that allows users to create interactive product demos completely visually without writing any code.

The key to Salesmachine’s success is simplicity. The drag-and-drop interface allows users to easily modify demo data, capture the essence of their SaaS products, and create compelling demos that resonate with prospects and drive sales. Salesmachine also provides analytics on demo consumption, giving valuable insights.

Who is Salesmachine intended for?

Salesmachine targets technology companies with 40+ employees that need efficient demo capabilities due to their wide range of products and customers. With a focus on continual innovation and user experience, Salesmachine aims to help customers create the world’s best product demos. The company measures success through the AARRR framework:

• Acquisition: New users and sign-ups

• Activation: Success creating first demo

• Retention: Number of demo views, indicating engagement and usefulness

• Referral: Number of teams adopting the product

• Revenue: Ultimate KPI showing value provided to customers

These metrics ensure Salesmachine delivers maximum value and moves closer to its goal of becoming the leading demo editor. With its intuitive approach, Salesmachine simplifies how sales, marketing, and success teams showcase their products to prospects and customers.

Meet the founder

Chris Strobl (pictured below) is a self-taught software developer who has successfully made the leap into entrepreneurship. He leveraged his technical skills and business acumen to secure funding from the renowned Silicon Valley venture firm, NFX, for his previous startup where he served as CEO and Co-Founder.

As of April 2022, Chris has stepped into the role of CEO and Founder of Salesmachine, a Silicon Valley-based company that provides an innovative platform to create interactive product demos without needing to write a single line of code.

Challenge

The primary challenge for the company was driving user retention. The focus was on increasing the number of daily demo views and specifically, the number of views generated from the demos created by users. These metrics served as crucial indicators of user engagement and the value of the product to customers.

However, Salesmachine faced limitations in understanding user behavior before implementing Microsoft Clarity. Without a visual user behavior tool, it was difficult to identify how users interacted with the platform, where they encountered issues, and which features garnered the most engagement. This lack of detailed, actionable data posed a significant obstacle, especially considering the competition from well-funded rivals in the market.

Maintaining competitive unit economics was crucial for Salesmachine. To achieve this, improving user retention was essential. However, without comprehensive visual data, the company’s product development efforts were ineffective, as they lacked insight into user needs and ways to enhance the user experience. Consequently, the retention rates were not as high as desired, impacting Salesmachine’s ability to compete effectively.

Recognizing the need for a sophisticated visual user behavior tool, Salesmachine turned to Microsoft Clarity. The company hoped to gain deeper insights into user behavior using this tool and utilize those insights to enhance their product and drive user retention. By bridging the gap in understanding their users, Salesmachine aimed to solve the challenge of retaining users, ultimately strengthening their competitive position in the market.

Finding a solution

Microsoft Clarity proved to be an invaluable tool in Salesmachine’s endeavor to boost user retention. The platform provided the company with data-rich visual insights that were instrumental in understanding users’ behavior and making informed decisions to improve their product. By leveraging Clarity’s heatmaps and session recordings, Salesmachine gained a deeper understanding of user interactions and identified areas for enhancement.

The heatmaps offered a clear visual representation of the most and least interacted areas within Salesmachine’s Chrome extension. This valuable insight enabled the team to identify popular features and potential pain points, providing guidance for product development and improvement efforts. With this information, Salesmachine made strategic changes, streamlining the demo creation process and enhancing the user interface to address user issues.

Additionally, session recordings provided a “real-time” view into how users interacted with the product, highlighting where they spent the most time, which features they used frequently, and where they encountered difficulties. This level of detail allowed Salesmachine to understand user behavior more intricately and make data-driven decisions. They could see that a landing page without a video performed much better. Their customers were much more inclined to continue through their funnel with an image demonstrating how their product works.

Thanks to the insights gathered from Clarity, Salesmachine successfully implemented changes that resonated with their users. In less than four weeks, the company experienced a remarkable 62% increase in product retention, as measured by daily demo views. These impressive results demonstrated that the changes informed by Clarity’s insights effectively enhanced user engagement and satisfaction with the Salesmachine product.

Learnings

The tool’s rich suite of features, particularly the heatmaps and session recordings, equipped the team with insights that allowed Salesmachine to optimize their product for better user engagement.

The session recordings provided Salesmachine with a direct window into user behavior, offering a detailed understanding of how users navigated through the product, which features they utilized, the difficulties they faced, and their overall interaction patterns. This real-time perspective proved instrumental in informing the team about the user experience and identifying areas for improvement in the product design.

One significant learning from the usage of Clarity was the importance of iframe embedding in Salesmachine’s product. Through the session recordings, the team realized that users often encountered difficulties while navigating the iframe, impacting their overall experience and retention rates.

By implementing changes based on this finding, such as improving the ease of use and accessibility of the iframe, Salesmachine significantly enhanced the user experience. These adjustments, informed by insights from Clarity, played a crucial role in the remarkable increase in their retention rates.

In conclusion, Microsoft Clarity provided Salesmachine with granular insights that enabled them to better understand user behavior and needs. It empowered the team to make informed, impactful changes to their product, resulting in a significant boost in user retention. This experience highlighted the importance of utilizing visual user behavior tools like Clarity to guide product development and improve user engagement.

Testimonial

“Microsoft Clarity provided valuable insights that helped us improve user retention at Salesmachine. Clarity revealed that streamlining our iFrame embedding process could significantly enhance the user experience. Acting on this insight allowed us to simplify a previously complicated process, directly leading to an increase in retention rates. The actionable recommendations from Clarity have been instrumental in guiding our product improvements and roadmap, fueling Salesmachine’s growth.”

Chris Strobl, CEO of Salesmachine

What is ufurnish.com?

ufurnish.com is the furniture and furnishings website revolutionizing how consumers search and compare products for their homes. Launched in 2021, ufurnish.com brings together 110+ high-street retailers and smaller independents in one place, giving consumers the confidence that they’ve found the perfect item.

Their consumers are home lovers who visit the platform to search and compare home furniture and furnishing products across the market. They regularly browse to get ideas, compare their favorite products on a personal board, get informed with practical tips, or buy items for their home.

ufurnish.com’s mission is to be the first-choice furniture and furnishings search and discovery platform.

Inderpaul (pictured below) has worked in various paid media and martech roles for over ten years agency and brand side across many verticals. He is now applying that experience as Head of Acquisition & Performance Marketing for ufurnish.com whose vision is to be the world’s largest search and discovery website for home furniture and furnishings.

The Challenge

As a data-driven organization, ufurnish.com prides itself on its ability to track and measure the performance of their website’s traffic channels using Google Analytics. However, despite their expertise, they were baffled by the ‘why’ behind some numbers.

Why were some channels underperforming regarding time on site and page depth? And why were certain category pages experiencing higher bounce rates than others?

While they had their theories, they lacked real validation beyond costly testing and the occasional misstep.

They knew we needed to gain a deeper understanding of these metrics if they were to optimize the traffic and user experience on their site. So, they set their sights on improving the average time spent and pages viewed on our website in 2023, using our newfound insights to achieve our goals efficiently and effectively.

The Solution

Microsoft Clarity proved to be a game-changer for ufurnish.com. With its heatmaps and session recordings, they could finally see what their users were doing on their website. Trends in user behavior were identified, and issues such as poor targeting or poor user experience (UX) were isolated, providing valuable insights into the effectiveness of their performance channels. The seamless integration of Clarity with Google Analytics allowed them to analyze the same traffic segments used to report performance and channel traffic, giving them a clear and comprehensive picture of their users.

Armed with the newfound visibility provided by Microsoft Clarity, ufurnish.com was able to fine-tune its targeting efforts and ensure that users found what they needed on its website. Through Clarity’s insights, they identified pain points in their user experience, such as product pages being a poorer experience for discovery compared to category pages, which was an assumption they had. Clarity helped them understand the reasons behind strong metrics like time on site and page depth for product pages, giving them the confidence to deliver traffic to product and category pages. In contrast, their main focus had previously been only on category pages.

Results

As a result of the insights gained from Microsoft Clarity, ufurnish.com confidently delivered traffic to both product and category pages, resulting in a 17% improvement in average time spent on their site and a 12.5% increase in the average number of pages viewed. These optimizations enabled ufurnish.com to improve its conversion points more effectively.

Utilizing the data-driven insights from Microsoft Clarity, ufurnish.com identified and cut out wasted marketing spend, improving the efficiency of their cost per visitor by 20%. These informed decisions and effective allocation of marketing resources resulted in improved conversion rates and cost savings in their marketing efforts.

With the combination of Microsoft Clarity insights and strategic optimizations, ufurnish.com could confidently drive traffic to their website, resulting in increased user engagement, improved conversion rates, and cost savings in its marketing efforts.

Learnings

Utilizing Microsoft Clarity yielded invaluable insights that significantly impacted their digital product roadmap, advertising strategy, and website experience. Through Clarity, they discovered that their pop-up banner for newsletter sign-ups was causing frustration among users, resulting in a high number of clicks and rage clicks. To address this issue and reduce initial friction, the company modified the timing of the pop-up only to appear after a user had visited more than one page. These insights from Clarity allowed the company to make data-driven decisions and implement changes to improve the user experience on their website, ultimately enhancing their digital product offerings and advertising strategy.

Another key learning was the lack of user engagement with filters on category pages. By analyzing user behaviors, they identified that many users struggled to find the specific filter they sought. In response, they changed some of the larger category filters and introduced new filtering options to encourage users to interact with them more.

Interestingly, the previous assumption about landing users on product pages was flawed. They had assumed that users were not able to discover new products when landing on these pages. However, with Clarity, they were able to see that many users engaged with the recommendation modules, such as similar products, resulting in increased engagement with multiple pages on the site. These insights have enabled them to refine their digital strategy and make data-driven decisions to optimize the user experience and drive business growth.

“With Clarity’s powerful features, we were able to gain invaluable insights into our users’ behaviour and preferences, which helped us make informed decisions to optimise our digital strategy. The recordings feature gave us visibility into how our users were interacting with our website, enabling us to improve landing page experiences and tailor our advertising campaigns to specific target audiences”

-Inderpaul , Head of Acquisition & Performance Marketing

What is Spark Shipping?

Spark Shipping was initially created to address the needs of their network of e-commerce sites, which started back in 2011.

With the rapid growth of their business, they needed to automate the core processes, so they set out to build a solution. After building the internal eCommerce automation platform, they immediately saw the value it brought to the business. They realized this was too good to keep to themselves and decided to share it with others experiencing the same problems.

That is how Spark Shipping was born in 2013! Now, more than a decade later, they have helped thousands of e-commerce site owners to automate their businesses and grow their profits.

What did Spark Shipping use before Clarity?

Spark Shipping used Hotjar, but soon found that the cost became prohibitive for the amount of data needed. They couldn’t get sufficient user data to understand the behavior of our users due to cost constraints, but with Clarity, Spark Shipping has access to all the data they need.

The Solution

Clarity allowed for access to complete data for all their users, enabling them to get full insight into their user’s journey and behavior within the Spark Shipping application. This has allowed them to continuously improve their user interface to ensure that users can take advantage of all of the benefits Spark Shipping offers them.

Session recordings and heatmaps have both been super helpful in the success for Spark Shipping. The session recordings allowed them to understand how users interact with the site from the first moment they land on a page, while heatmaps helped pinpoint sections of the site that visitors found confusing.

Using heatmaps, Spark Shipping found cases where users were expecting elements to be clickable that were plain text. Simply knowing this has allowed for adding links to pages to increase CTR and user experience.

Using Session recordings, they found landing pages where visitors were expecting a CTA but did not find one. This caused them to hit the back button instead of progressing. After using Clarity, Spark Shipping updated these pages to include a CTA right where visitors expected it, which has increased leads and reduced the bounce rate.

Learnings

By choosing Clarity as their behavioral analytics tool, Spark Shipping was able to get the full picture of how their users interacted with their website. With no data limitations or pricing tiers they increased their inbound leads by 30% with session recordings and heatmaps, by visualizing pain points for their customers within their UX design.

“Clarity is an indispensable tool for our business, as it allows us to understand exactly what our users are doing when using our software. This has enabled us to continuously improve the user experience for our clients, making sure that they can get the full benefit of Spark Shipping.”

Charles Palleschi

How B Interactive saw conversion rate increases from 1.13% to 1.9% and AOV go from $115 to $140.

Continue reading “B Interactive”

What is Softr.io?

Softr.io enables anyone to create applications for their business. With a low learning curve, creating applications with Sofrt.io was designed to be as easy as putting a PowerPoint together. You can create a variety of applications, such as client portals, internal tools, marketplaces, websites, landing pages, and more! Did we mention no coding is necessary? That’s the magic of Softr.io.

Mario Araujo Head of Growth at Softr.io (pictured below) loves using Clarity so much, he made a weekly meeting out of watching session recordings. This has been a great resource for the Softr.io team to improve the customer journey.

The Problem

Softr.io ran into an issue with matching the right journey for a specific customer. The needs of one person might not have aligned with another. The most common difference was between a small business team developing apps for their customers and a large business needing to use them for internal usage. Having two different use cases meant needing two different customer journeys.

Before Clarity, it was like flying blind with no instruments to guide Softr.io in the right direction. With Clarity, it’s like sitting right next to your customer and watching how they interact with the website. This gave Softr.io a better understanding of how their customers interacted with their website and what journey they needed to convert.

The Solution

Softr.io was able to segment its visitors within Clarity’s Dashboard to identify which journeys needed to be changed to adapt to the appropriate visitor.

Looking at Clarity session recordings turned into a weekly meeting at Softr.io. Every week the team gathered together and watched anywhere from 5-10 session recordings that were jam-packed with great learnings. From these weekly meetings, the Softr.io team has been able to better serve their customers by understanding the journey they need to be on, instead of what they thought they should be on.

Improvements

After adding Clarity to their website, Softr.io saw a tremendous improvement in their customer’s journey. It didn’t happen overnight, but by keeping consistent with weekly meetings and updates to the website, they improved the conversion rate. They started with around a 45% conversion rate from customer sign-up to onboarding and now boasts a 90% conversion rate.

“Microsoft Clarity has become a critical tool in our toolbox. It’s simple, easy to use, and provides great insights so we can continuously improve”

Softr.io

Sven (founder of intribe) has been clear on the need for a visual behavior tool. He wouldn’t try and build an app or run a website without one.

They originally used Hotjar’s free version but kept running into limits and restrictions with their features. They were about to upgrade but luckily discovered Microsoft Clarity through a friend’s recommendation. Microsoft Clarity had nearly every feature Hotjar offered with no cost, limits, or restrictions.

With Clarity, intribe could identify user confusion and see where they were dropping out of the funnel.  They even saw that users kept clicking on certain texts they thought would be a button or link with Clarity’s dead click feature.

They utilized the session recording feature to see exactly how a user behaved, compared to just the final data collected.  This was so powerful for them to see where the users ran into pain points on their website, which allowed intribe to make the necessary changes.

The biggest fix was moving their Call-To-Action above the fold, which led to a 300% increase in clicks on their CTA button.

Learnings

By watching their user’s behavior with session recordings, intribe was able to learn more about their customers than they did previously by interviewing or surveying them to uncover and solve UX issues. You save more time and allocate fewer resources to finding the correct solutions. With Clarity, you can watch up to 100,000 session recordings daily and filter the sessions which are critical to your site performance.

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