How Places for People increased page views by 63% with Microsoft Clarity
How Places for People Revamped their Website to Increase Conversions and Engagement
Places for People is the UK’s leading social enterprise dedicated to changing lives by creating and supporting thriving communities. With a diverse portfolio, the company consists of market leaders in housing, regeneration, development, investment management, property management, and leisure services. Managing over 245,000 homes and operating 100 leisure facilities across the UK, Places for People provides homes and essential services to approximately 500,000 customers, supporting health and well-being through millions of visits each month. Beyond these services, their social impact programs address employment, homelessness prevention, health, finances, and well-being, delivering 334 million in value to communities in the last year.
Learn how the changes implemented with Clarity’s help led to these significant improvements within the first month:
16.8% increase in page views across the entire Careers section
241% increase in views on the “Life at Places for People” page, driven by Clarity insights.
63.8% increase in page views on the “Discover Your Career” webpage, showing a more complete user journey from landing on the site to applying for a vacancy.
50% of users scrolling to the bottom of the Careers landing page, engaging with vital information about the company’s values.
The Challenge
With multiple websites catering to various sectors and services, Places for People sought a deeper understanding of how their diverse audience interacted with these digital platforms. Each website had distinct goals: while the New Homes site focused on lead generation for development sales, the main website was designed to assist affordable housing customers in managing their accounts and accessing helpful information. The organization’s goal was to optimize user experience across all platforms, ensuring ease of access and a seamless digital journey.
Previously, the team used Hotjar but lacked the resources to monitor heatmaps and clickmaps consistently. With a growing need for additional insights, they decided to switch to Microsoft Clarity, capitalizing on its more additional features while saving time and money. One of their primary focuses was the Careers section, which wasn’t effectively showcasing Places for People’s value to potential job applicants. The Talent Acquisition team wanted a more compelling and engaging experience for job seekers.
The Solution: Microsoft Clarity
Clarity provided the team with a simple, visual way to explain the current performance of the Careers section to their stakeholders and allowed them to demonstrate the reasoning behind every design decision the team was making. It meant that they could visually show them that by having a button for “Current Vacancies” at the top of the page, 50% of users were clicking it and dropping off the page before they’d even read about Places for People or any of the reasons they would want to work here, which was an eye-opening statistic for everyone involved.
When digging further into the performance of these webpages they were able to get a really good idea of how user intent on these pages informed the effectiveness of different elements. A great example is the content slider seen below – this was a simple way to horizontally showcase information without increasing scroll depth significantly. However, they noticed that these were getting a lot of rage clicks, and people were gravitating towards the “View All Current Vacancies” button more. They determined that this was due to the intent of the user – someone who is visiting the page only to view information about working in their Leisure company is going to find it frustrating scrolling through content relevant to the housing or sales parts of the Group, and so they knew that the scroller couldn’t be used for content like this.
Clarity also highlighted some pages that were performing particularly well. The Life at Places for People page, where they house information about the social value they deliver, the rewards and benefits available to colleagues and their options for developing careers, had over 50% of users scrolling to the bottom of the page. This was great news for the Talent Acquisition team, but they knew that they could take this further and if people were interested in this information, then they could redesign the page to put more information in without impacting the amount of scrolling required.
Actions Taken
Every feature in Clarity was essential to this project. The heat and click maps not only allowed them to make informed design decisions but also meant they could communicate those in an impactful way to their stakeholders. The new Copilot feature was also really great for summarizing large amounts of data and providing actionable insights into how the previous Careers pages were performing.
As a result of the work with Clarity, Places for People completely revamped the entire Careers section. They tried to shorten page length where possible, however as it was clear that user intent was influencing engagement, they kept pages longer where we knew that they’d be read or added in quick menus to help account for the increased page length.
On the main Careers landing page they added a new, highly visual entry point to the site as this was the page they were optimizing for Google and they wanted the first impression to be striking. However, Clarity taught them that having a button to the current vacancies in the banner meant users skipped past all the other pages, so for launch they changed the button to nudge people towards “Life at Places for People” instead.
Below you can see some of the before/after shots:
Before
After
After
They added far more value to the main Careers landing page, including a new content slider for their People Promises so people can look through and see how their values align with Places for People. They felt this content was far more suitable for the slider as there was low user intent – users are simply browsing rather than trying to find something specific.
Below is the page users navigate to in order to start their career search. The previous page used the slider which meant more rage clicks as people were scrolling through trying to find something specific. The new grid layout gives a more visual and on-brand insight into each business area. This page does lengthen significantly on mobile and so we built in a quick menu at the top to allow the user to jump to specific parts of the page.
BeforeAfter
Places for People intend to monitor the updates and make changes accordingly depending on engagement.
Results Overview
The changes implemented with Clarity’s help led to significant improvements within the first month:
A 16.8% increase in page views across the entire Careers section.
A 241% increase in views on the “Life at Places for People” page, driven by Clarity insights. Clarity also told them that the “Life at Places for People” button on the header of the main Careers page was the fourth most used element on the page.
A 63.8% increase in page views on the “Discover Your Career” webpage, showing a more complete user journey from landing on the site to applying for a vacancy.
50% of users scrolling to the bottom of the Careers landing page, engaging with vital information about the company’s values.
Key Learnings for Places for People
The heat maps, click maps and live recordings give a far more visual representation of data and make it much easier to justify design decisions. It also gives peace of mind to stakeholders: they want to know that decisions are being made based on data, and Clarity makes it easier to showcase this.
Regular audits on Microsoft Clarity are a valuable time investment. Places for People now have a plan in place to audit every website in their Group twice a year and provide actionable insights to the business areas to help with their specific goals.
Segmenting tools are excellent and they now set up segments whenever possible.
The Copilot features are a gamechanger allowing the team to get really quick actionable insights into the data and is something they are regularly using now.
This case study highlights how Microsoft Clarity helped Places for People optimize its web pages, leading to significant improvements in user engagement and overall page views.
As a digital marketer, Microsoft Clarity is one of my absolute favorite tools. It’s perfect for visualizing data to stakeholders and helps justify why changes need to be made, and it’s also incredible easy and intuitive to use too. We’re ensuring it’s on every website in our portfolio with plans to run regular audits so we can continue to improve.
– Kieran Singh, Digital Marketing Manager at Places for People
Learn how AnswerThis.io more than doubled their user retention with Clarity.
What is AnswerThis.io?
AnswerThis.io is on a quest to revolutionize the research landscape through cutting-edge AI technology. At the core of the platform is a research assistant tool, crafted to meet the diverse needs of scholars and consultants. AnswerThis.io pulls data from a vast reservoir of over 200 million sources spanning a multitude of subjects and topics. Their users are primarily researchers and consultants immersed in literature reviews and data analysis within their specialized industries. In the coming years, AnswerThis.io aspires to revolutionize research methodologies by leveraging AI to streamline repetitive tasks and cultivate a more streamlined, insightful research journey. Heading this endeavor is Ayush Garg, the founder and CEO of AnswerThis.io.
Challenge
Utilizing a visual user behavior analysis tool was essential for AnswerThis.io to understand and optimize how users interacted with its application. They started using Clarity to gather feedback on how users were using the app, and if there were issues in usability. Their goal was to refine the user experience significantly, aiming to double their user retention from 20% to 40%. Before implementing Clarity, they lacked the means to identify usability issues effectively. Prior to Clarity, they inspected their SQL database for usage and had internal tools but they had to change their code base and push to production every time they wanted to track a new KPI. They also wanted a way to analyze user recordings, and that’s why they went with Clarity rather than going with internal tools.
Old Homepage
Updated homepage
Using Clarity
From the onset, they integrated Clarity into their system, laying a strong foundation for data-driven insights. This pivotal decision empowered them to not only monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), such as export rates, but also delve into user behavior analytics, pinpointing areas of the website posing navigational challenges. As they progressed, they leveraged Clarity to propel user growth initiatives and attain heightened conversion rates, thus cementing its indispensable role in their strategic growth.
Actions Taken
Utilizing Clarity’s invaluable heatmaps and session recordings, they meticulously identified friction points within their user journey. Armed with the insights from these features, they harnessed the power of data to inform their design decisions, ultimately fine-tuning their onboarding flow and refining search functionality for enhanced user experience. Some of the adjustments they made, guided by Clarity’s insights, included integrating Single Sign-On (SSO) login to bolster sign-up conversions, streamlining their app’s interface for greater user clarity, and orchestrating a comprehensive redesign of their onboarding process. They also analyzed that their search UI was confusing for some of their users based on recordings as well as conversions. They changed the search UI and saw an increase in user retention.
Before: Old search UI
After: New look UI
Results
They noticed while using Clarity, that a lot of users that came to the website dropped after going to the sign-up page. Therefore, they added a single sign on to vastly improve the conversions in users that came to the website and users that signed up.
Because of this, between February 2024 and April 2024, there was a remarkable surge in user retention, soaring from a modest 20% to an impressive 50% for AnswerThis.io. Along with that, their week over week active user rate went up by 40% due to authentication being friction-less. And through analyzing how much time users spent on the results page, a KPI used to improve their AI engine, they were able to increase their average weekly query per user by 200%!
Learnings
Clarity provided AnswerThis.io with an unprecedented level of insight into their users’ behavior and pain points. By leveraging Clarity’s powerful features, they were able to make data-driven decisions that significantly improved the user experience and led to substantial increases in key metrics like user retention and mailing list sign-ups. User retention is important to them as it directly impacts their monthly recurring revenue and overall growth. The longer they retain users, the more valuable the business becomes. Clarity’s ability to visualize user journeys and identify areas of friction was particularly valuable in helping them optimize their search functionality and onboarding process. Clarity’s ease of use and comprehensive analytics has made it an indispensable part of their growth strategy.
Clarity has been a game-changer for AnswerThis.io. The visual insights and user behavior data provided by the tool have allowed us to optimize our platform and achieve remarkable growth in user retention and engagement. With Clarity, we’ve been able to make data-driven decisions that have propelled our business forward and solidified our position in AI-powered research assistance. The tool’s ability to help us refine our search functionality and onboarding process has been particularly impactful, leading to a 150% increase in user retention.“
How TurkNet increased e-commerce conversion rates by 107% with Clarity
Who is TurkNet?
TurkNet, established in 1996, is a leading independent telecom operator in Turkey, offering a range of services including telephone, internet, and data center solutions to both consumers and businesses. Recognized as one of Turkey’s Top 100 IT Companies, TurkNet continues to expand its significant fiber optic infrastructure for comprehensive local and international connectivity.
With a robust national data network, TurkNet ensures high-quality services for global carriers and wholesalers. Additionally, TurkNet provides user-friendly internet connection services for residential and commercial customers via its online platform and customer service center.
The Team
Zaliha Terk, Furkan Demirtaş, Özgül Çullu and Nermin Canik make up the digital marketing team at TurkNet. They aim to continuously increase service availability and monitor check action and e-commerce conversion rates by analyzing their web pages with the highest traffic.
The Challenge
On their website, they have a landing page where users can enter their address to check if internet service is available and learn how fast of an internet speed they can get. Users can also complete their subscription online or by calling the call center. In order to achieve their goals, they’ve experimented with various platforms simultaneously.
The team analyzed traffic from mobile devices using Google Analytics data and discovered that service availability check actions on the primary landing page decreased in specific screen resolutions (lower screen resolution correlates with lower conversion rates). After careful evaluation, they determined that Microsoft Clarity was the best solution for them.
Using Clarity
The TurkNet team reviews session recordings to continuously monitor potential usability and technical issues that users may encounter on the site. By analyzing session recordings with particular segments on Microsoft Clarity, they identified that some users were not closing the cookie consent popup and couldn’t see the form and button at the bottom of the page.
Additionally, they measure the impact of recent changes and conduct A/B testing. Clarity not only avoids limiting them based on the audience but also it automatically detects JavaScript errors, offering the team more extensive filtering capabilities.
As a result, the landing page failed to offer appropriate actions tailored to specific audience segments, resulting in higher bounce & exit rates from the page.
Results
Collaborating with the user experience (UX) and law teams, they redesigned the cookie consent screen to comply with regulations. These changes significantly increased performance resulting in a 72% increase in the number of service availability check actions and a 107% increase in internet package subscriptions.
Learnings
Microsoft Clarity consistently supports the TurkNet team in exploring their users customer journey. They review session recordings after every website change and analyze heatmap and scroll map data before adding any module to their pages. Landing page and funnel optimizations are paramount for their digital marketing and product management teams. With Clarity, they can further analyze events like site exits and cross-channel transitions (from website to call center) and define every step of the user journey.
Microsoft Clarity continues to be a game changer in the digital marketing sector. One of its key advantages is its ability to integrate with other analytics and A/B testing platforms. The TurkNet team plans to integrate all features of the Clarity platform more effectively into their road map in the upcoming periods.
Testimonials
“Microsoft Clarity has been essential in understanding the user experience (UX) challenges on our website. By leveraging its detailed heat maps and insightful session recordings, we were able to pinpoint exactly where users faced obstacles. Thanks to Clarity, we can ensure our website not only meets but exceeds user expectations, providing a seamless and enjoyable browsing experience.” – Zaliha Terk, Digital Marketing Manager
“Thanks to Clarity’s unique and efficient features, we detect situations that we cannot see anywhere else as data on our website, we produce optimizations for the problems we detect, and we also use time management effectively thanks to copilot.” -Furkan Demirtaş, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist
“Thanks to Microsoft Clarity, we can analyze the behavior of users on our website, detect problems that we cannot see and produce solutions.” -Özgül Zeybek, Digital Marketing Executive
“Thanks to its unique features, Microsoft Clarity allows us to understand user behaviors and to identify pain points our users encounter on our website, transforming them into gain points. This case study serves as an example of deriving data-driven hypotheses.” – Nermin Canik, Conversion Optimization Consultant
Learn how the Recoreo team increased on-site time for Gym Geek by 31%.
What is Gym Geek?
Gym Geek is committed to providing well-researched and expertly curated workout routines and exercise guides to help users achieve their fitness goals.
Their platform offers free, meticulously crafted workout regimens and comprehensive exercise tutorials. With a focus on creating immersive and high-quality content experiences, Gym Geek caters to a diverse audience, from beginners to experienced bodybuilding enthusiasts.
They aim to establish themselves as the leading authority in online fitness content. Gym Geek seeks to set the standard for quality and accessibility in digital fitness through innovation and dedication.
Brendon Boshell, the founder of Recoreo, has been immersed in the software industry for a decade, garnering extensive expertise across diverse domains encompassing both business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-facing product landscapes.
Throughout his career, Brendon has assumed pivotal leadership positions within product-centric teams.
Challenge
The Recoreo team was looking to improve content readership and on-page engagement for Gym Geek. They noticed that the average time on-site could be improved and that users were not scrolling down pages, which signaled that content needed to be improved.
Using Clarity
The Recoreo team used FullStory and Mouseflow before shifting entirely to Microsoft Clarity. This platform enables them to have a real-time understanding of how visitors interact with the Gym Geek website.
They use the session recordings every day to see how users react to new content or experiences. This helps them quickly identify potential issues or points of frustration and make necessary adjustments. They also use scroll maps to ensure that users fully engage with the content.
Clarity and Copilot has been instrumental in Recoreo’s work, allowing them to test new content experiences swiftly. Whether it’s a fresh content format or an interactive tool, they can promptly gauge user engagement. This agility in decision-making and optimization has led to significant improvements in user experience, reflected in their increased average time on site.
In addition to looking at individual recordings, they use Session insights to create automated summaries across their recordings.
The Session Insights feature is a game-changer, providing actionable insights for website improvement. It suggests not only enhancements but also flags ‘Unsuccessful attempts,’ enabling quick identification of user frustrations with content or ads.
Actions Taken
To reach their goal of improving on-site time for Gym Geek, Clarity was able to provide insight with the help of Copilot to assist Recoreo with making three key website improvements:
One of Copilot’s recommendations was to enhance their 90-day workout plan with interactive tools. Recoreo followed this advice and embedded a calorie calculator, which quickly became the most clicked button on the page with 10% of users engaging with it. This tangible result underscores the value of Copilot’s insights.
Copilot suggested adding a quiz to one of Gym Geek’s workout routines. This was not a product idea they had before. They rapidly built a new quiz feature and could instantly measure users interacting with the tool.
Copilot highlighted some “Unsuccessful attempts” where users were having problems with Vignette ads. The Recoreo team investigated this and adjusted the ad delivery settings to improve the user experience on the Gym Geek website.
Results
As a result of the changes suggested by Clarity and implemented by the Recoreo team, they were able to increase time on-site for Gym Geek by 31%.
Learnings
Clarity has proven invaluable for several reasons for Recoreo. Firstly, Session insights provided comprehensive summaries across all recordings, eliminating the need to watch each one individually for valuable insights.
This feature, unique to Clarity, has benefited the Recoreo team, offering efficiency not found in other tools. Additionally, Clarity’s simplicity in installation and seamless functionality without the need for extensive configuration further underscores its utility, making it a highly effective tool for optimizing workflow and enhancing productivity.
And finally, the suggestions offered by Copilot in Clarity were instrumental in creating engaging content and interactive website elements like the calorie counter and quiz which had a direct, positive impact on readership and user engagement.
Testimonial
“Microsoft Clarity is a must-have for any website. It provides a real-time pulse for our website, with useful tools like recordings, heatmaps and scroll maps. The Copilot AI feature provides relevant and accurate insight into user behavior, allowing us to quickly identify frustrating experiences and pursue new product opportunities.”
How Social Gains Prevented Its Client From Losing Thousands in Revenue
What is Social Gains?
Established in 2016 by Drew Clayton, Social Gains arose from Drew’s decade-long experience working in major digital agencies. Recognizing SMEs (subject matter experts) need to tap into their first-party data, especially those lacking insights into visitor behavior, Drew set out to bridge this gap. Social Gains focuses on enhancing conversion rates through web analytics, serving SaaS, e-commerce, healthcare, and B2B sectors.
Social Gains creates client acquisition systems that utilize both inbound and outbound channels, with web analytics as the cornerstone for all digital marketing strategies. The goal is simple: to help clients understand their data with a tailored web analytics approach for digital marketing. Web analytics is at the core of every strategy they implement, using tools like Clarity to explain and demystify reasons for low conversion rates to clients.
Challenge
When a new pharmacy group client joined Social Gains, they highlighted a significant issue impacting revenue growth – the low number of online bookings for their primary services. Despite decent daily organic traffic, low-volume users were completing the online form. Even after extensive testing by in-house web developers, the root cause couldn’t be isolated to resolve it.
Using Clarity
To tackle this, the team at Social Gains used Clarity for detailed analysis, tracking user segments for specific URLs. In just hours, they pinpointed a specific problem with Android devices, which accounted for over 30% of all users.
Social Gains zeroing in on the issue using Clarity.
Clarity screen recordings showed users could only proceed up to step two on the form when using an Android device. This insight revealed a significant revenue loss running to 5 figures weekly, as hundreds of Android mobile users gave up booking out of frustration. This finding from Clarity was crucial in fixing the issue and preventing further financial losses for their pharma client.
Actions Taken
Social Gains used a variety of Clarity features to find, explore, and rectify the problem for their client:
Session grouping summaries generated by CoPilot’s AI-powered insights and identifying top website user paths to reveal and resolve bottlenecks
CoPilot’s AI -Powered insights in Clarity.
Segmenting users by device (Android) with dashboard insights
Adding a filter to pinpoint dead clicks causing poor user experience
Results
When Drew shared the website recording with their new pharma client, revealing almost 100 frustrated clicks from a single user, they felt relieved that Social Gains had identified this crucial website issue that could harm revenue generation and their brand.
Social Gains using session recordings to pinpoint poor user experience on their client’s site.
This quickly built trust among Social Gains and their new pharma client. Social Gains is currently enhancing the entire booking platform for their pharma client based on insights from Clarity, which has resulted in increased revenue for Social Gains.
Learnings
Clarity’s ability to provide in-depth analytics into user segments through screen recordings and advanced filters, coupled with CoPilot’s AI-power insights, helped Social Gains to solve their client’s problem and foster their trust quickly.
Testimonial
“Clarity is my go-to for all new clients, including my agency’s website. It’s the secret sauce for instantly fostering strong client relationships and reducing churn. I highly recommend adding Clarity to your agency’s toolkit and implementing it right away when onboarding new clients or integrating it into your audits. Clients are always impressed when they see the insights from Clarity heat maps.”
Funnelsupply is not a typical marketing agency. They’re a niche online marketing agency, specializing in creating profitable lead-generation funnels.
Launched in 2023, Funnelsupp.ly has pioneered a simple and flexible subscription model for its clients, offering comprehensive services encompassing marketing funnel development, including landing pages, ad campaign management, advanced cookieless tracking and unlimited landing page creation.
Funnelsupply’s clientele spans diverse industries, including architecture firms, cosmetic clinics, online course creators, and e-commerce brands, among others, seeking enhanced online lead generation capabilities.
With over 15 years of combined experience in marketing and media buying, Funnelsupply co-founders Simon and Niels Blonk have diligently honed their expertise in crafting highly effective landing pages and ad campaigns, culminating in the generation of millions of leads for diverse businesses on a global scale.
Engaged within the ‘indie hacking’ and ‘build in public’ communities, particularly on platforms like X, Simon, and Niels, generously share knowledge on conversion rate optimization (CRO) and broader online marketing strategies.
Their contributions have proven invaluable to numerous startups and solopreneurs, who benefit from their insights, tips, and tricks.
Challenge
Funnelsupply’s core business is to create online lead-generation funnels for their clients. Their optimization process relies on the daily input from tracking and analytics tools, allowing them to perform deep user analysis to maximize client initiatives and their marketing efforts.
As a growing company, the team at Funnelsupp.ly was looking to optimize their website’s homepage to improve performance.
Niels shared, “On our Funnelsupp.ly landing page, we continuously run tests and wanted insights about which version of the hero section (above the fold) outperforms other versions.
Since our homepage is a landing page, and our offering has quite a high price point, we don’t receive enough conversion data weekly to base decisions on. That is why we started looking at session depth and session time as KPIs that produce more data to work with.
To achieve this, we used Clarity’s custom tags and segments. Thanks to this, we have tested several hero sections and quickly doubled the performance of session depth and session time KPIs.”
In addition, a recent client of Funnelsupply was looking to improve landing page performance for an ad campaign launching a brand-new service.
Funnelsupply was looking to help their client with the following to ensure campaign success for their product launch:
Improve landing page CTR
Identify the most enticing price points for buyers
Pinpoint landing page drop-off
Using Clarity
The ability to visualize and isolate user behavior with session recordings and custom tags in Clarity was a game changer for the Funnelsupply team. Making real-time, impactful optimization a breeze on behalf of their client.
Actions Taken
As a result of the insights gained, Funnelsupply was able to help their client:
Identify where their client’s landing page saw users drop off
Isolate what elements of pages users click on, of which they didn’t think they would need to be clickable
Test what kind of headlines and sub headlines cause the users to stop scrolling for a longer time and which cause fast scrolling
Solidify the pricing section as a second-step sub-page of this funnel so they can further analyze which price points cause instant drop-offs and which do not
By watching user sessions, they found out that visitors tried to click on the ‘5 star rating visual’, expecting something to happen, but it didn’t. What they did was ‘anchor link’ it to the testimonial section at the bottom of the page, so the user flow would not break.
Results
After a week, they increased landing page CTR from around 4-5% to 25%.
At the same time, they could feed the ad campaign algorithms with more useful click-data, which resulted in even better performance.
Currently, after multiple optimizations for this client, they’re generating 5x more leads than before and decreased the cost per lead by 50%.
Thanks to Clarity, they accomplished all this within a short time-frame and a reasonable ad budget.
Learnings
Using Clarity features such as session recordings has been invaluable for gaining deeper insights into user behavior for the Funnelsupply team.
While numbers and KPIs provide a broad overview of a page’s performance, observing user interactions offers unparalleled insights.
By leveraging Clarity to identify unexpected user actions, they were able to pinpoint areas for improvement and optimize pages accordingly.
Custom tags, particularly for elements like hero section versions, enhanced their ability to segment data for more comprehensive analysis.
As a result of these insights, they implemented numerous changes to their own and their clients’ landing pages, continuously refining and enhancing the user experience.
Testimonial
“Clarity gives us invaluable insights that help improve performance of our client’s marketing funnels, maximizing their ROI.”
Parvis Invest Inc. is a real estate investment platform and marketplace that was formed in 2020 after founder and CEO David Michaud tried to raise capital from accredited investors for a real estate project. The process was cumbersome, overly legalistic, and expensive. Parvis was created to change that.
The company provides a B2B SaaS product, EMDsolutions, which targets private real estate funds and developers in Canada.
Parvis is quickly becoming Canada’s leading private real estate investment platform. Its goals are simple: to be the “go-to” place for accredited and eligible investors to find and invest in the highest-quality real estate developments and funds. Scott Spence, Head of Growth (pictured left) was set on discovering what user’s actions were taking place on his website, and how he could improve the conversion rate. Parvis had previously been using Google Analytics but decided to incorporate Microsoft Clarity to solve his team’s challenges.
Challenge
Data, as it’s presented in traditional analytics tool kits, tells a story but does not paint a picture. The combination of other tools failed to address three core problems that Parvis was trying to solve:
What are individual customers doing on our website?
Are the customers taking the actions we want?
How does the Referral source change (1) and (2)?
Overall, Parvis wanted to improve conversion rates on high-traffic pages. They noticed that certain pages were experiencing high exit and bounce rates and wanted to understand why.
Using Clarity
The ability to visualize user actions changed the game. Using session recordings, heatmaps, and referrer data on Clarity, meant they could see exactly where people were dropping and where efforts should be focused. The Clarity product made this a seamless process for the Parvis team.
Actions Taken
As a result of the insights gained, Parvis redesigned their homepage.
They implemented a clear CTA, making the messaging far simpler, and updated the overall design.
In addition, they changed CTAs on high-performing pages, moving them from the end of the article (where they were rarely seen) to a custom sidebar that was more visible. They experimented with various placements for their special offers, aligning them more intuitively with the users’ journeys.
Lastly, they also added a “sticky” offer widget that remained visible as users read the content.
Right: Previous placement of offers below the fold. Left: New placement of offers in the restructured blog.
Results
With the help of Clarity, Parvis was able to produce impressive results for their website. Let’s take a look at the improvements:
~10% Increase avg. engagement time per session
Avg 10.71% decrease in bounce rates on blog posts
27.5% increase in conversions MoM
BEFORE
AFTER
Stats: October 2023 (before changes) vs. November 2023 (after changes).
Learnings
Clarity provided a deeper understanding of user behavior. Through powerful heatmaps, screen recordings, and analytics, Parvis uncovered that the placements of the relevant offers, including investment opportunities and ‘book a meeting’ widgets, were suboptimal—buried too low on pages, eluding the users’ attention, and in some cases lacking high relevance to visitors. Clarity validated (and invalidated) assumptions and pinpointed problematic areas where the user was losing user interest.
Testimonial
With Clarity, we’ve finally found the tool that tells us exactly what individuals are doing on our website. Being able to run real-time tests and see exactly how users are interacting with our site has accelerated our growth marketing efforts and substantially increased revenue.
How Masters of Scale repositioned content for higher user engagement with Clarity
What is Masters of Scale?
Since its launch in 2017, Masters of Scale has grown into one of the most prestigious properties for business leaders, thanks to its incomparable guest list, iconic host, and groundbreaking format. Masters of Scale is an award-winning platform for entrepreneurial wisdom, encompassing Rapid Response — an audio series about leading in the face of crisis — a daily learning app, a best-selling book, virtual and live events, and weekly newsletters.
Challenge
After launching their redesigned website, the Masters of Scale team sought out Microsoft Clarity to better understand their user base and how they interact with the site. Were they coming to access podcast episodes? To subscribe to the newsletter? To register for live or virtual events? With such a wide range of offerings, it was important to ensure that people understood what Masters of Scale was right away.
To the Masters of Scale team, success means a clear & user-friendly web and mobile experience that gives users clear information about current and upcoming guests and episodes.
Using Clarity
Microsoft Clarity’s usage analytics tools quickly revealed a few key learnings:
~75% of the Masters of Scale 60-day traffic was attributed to sessions from entirely new users
Users’ average homepage scroll depth is ~60%
Through this discovery, the Masters of Scale team identified that most new visitors were not scrolling deep enough and were missing the most important content: a context-setting episode carousel highlighting tentpole guests, like President Barack Obama, Spanx Founder Sarah Blakely, and Hubspot Co-founder Dharmesh Shah.
In podcasting, featuring tentpole guests and covering current events and trends tend to increase listen rates. Knowing that the podcast is the entry point to the Masters of Scale brand and website, the aim is to meaningfully expand their audience and engaged community. Maximizing visibility into trending episodes is a key tactic.
Finding a solution
The team utilized these Microsoft Clarity insights to reprioritize their homepage layout, bumping tentpole names to live right below the fold and swapping a banner’s content to feature their new series on AI. These changes reprioritized their content delivery while keeping the user top-of-mind.
Results
With the data from Microsoft Clarity, the Masters of Scale team continues to monitor the impact of these content-related changes. Notably, there has been a 204% increase in traffic to AI-themed episodes. Microsoft Clarity has been an invaluable tool for efficient data tracking and helping the team keep a close eye on user behavior and opportunities for data-driven pivots.
Learnings
By understanding that new users account for most of their web traffic, Masters of Scale refined their webflow to elevate the new user experience by prioritizing their best content, encouraging clickthoughs, and reducing churn.
Testimonial
“Microsoft Clarity’s scroll depth and heatmap features help us to ensure our content is resonating as we grow our audience.”
How Prompt Genie increased trial conversions by 11% within weeks
What is Prompt Genie?
Prompt Genie was founded in March 2023 to address a growing need in the market for an innovative tool that helps users of ChatGPT and other AI-powered systems. The company provides a Software as a Service (SaaS) product that provides access to three distinct algorithms tailored for the creation of prompts. It’s designed for people who use ChatGPT in their daily work, like teachers, business owners, and marketers.
Natik Aggarwal is one of the 3 co-founders of Prompt Genie, managing responsibilities as a product manager, software developer, and community support manager.
Challenge
Natik and his team aimed to increase user activations and reduce churn while segmenting users to improve marketing efforts. The product received an overwhelmingly positive response, with traffic and subscribers increasing rapidly. However, as the hype for ChatGPT normalized, the company noticed a high churn rate and low conversion rate.
Finding a solution
Microsoft Clarity proved to be a valuable tool for Prompt Genie as it was easy to set up and intuitive to use. The tool helped the team understand its users and how they interacted with the product, which in turn led to significant improvements in the user experience. They analyzed Clarity session recordings and heatmaps to identify UI problems, pinpoint when certain bugs occurred, and understand where users spent most of their time.
BEFORE
AFTER
For example, the original landing page attempted to educate users with a descriptive banner and short video. However, after using Clarity to analyze user flows, the team learned that visitors were struggling to understand exactly what the product did. As a result, they added an interactive demo on the landing page to let users quickly experience the power of the product.
After the demo was implemented, the team identified a significant user experience issue using Clarity session recordings. Users were frequently frustrated by the demo, as it redirected them to the sign-up page whenever they tried to use the full version of the product. This process not only required an account creation step but also prompted users for credit card information just to start a free trial.
Such an upfront upsell was off-putting, as evidenced by many users quickly navigating back in their browsers – a behavior observed in the session recordings. To enhance the initial user interaction with the product, the company has disabled this feature, effectively eliminating this source of user frustration. Instead, a small banner now appears, gently prompting the user to sign-up or login.
In order to segment their users and identify major groups, the company used insights from Clarity to refine the list of example prompts seen below.
These examples span many different use cases. As a result, the team can focus on a subset of users who are interested in prompts for academic writing, separately from users who want to create a marketing and brand strategy.
Using heatmaps, Natik was able to filter based on which demo prompt users clicked on. As a result, the company was able to quantitatively measure the different user segments interacting with the demo.
Results
Prompt Genie cross-referenced Clarity data with onboarding survey data to compare conversion rates among the different audience segments. The Clarity data also helped the company identify the top user segment, which led to a doubling down in marketing efforts to target that specific group. This helped Prompt Genie increase trial conversions from 15% to 26% in a matter of weeks.
Learnings
By using Clarity, Natik and his team at Prompt Genie were able to gain valuable insights into user behavior and improve the user experience. Clarity helped the team at Prompt Genie identify major user groups, segment users by job function, and improve conversation rates. The tool provides a bird’s eye view of trends in customer segments based on marketing campaigns and helps identify gaps that need improvement.
Testimonial
“Clarity is a really amazing tool and super easy to integrate with your website. It has provided us with vast amounts of data to make decisions based on user behaviour and improve user experience as a result. The fact that it is free to use forever gives you even more of a reason to give it a try, it is a no brainer to have it integrated with your website“
How Rotoballer Got 3x Higher Click-through with Microsoft Clarity
Conversion Wizards Background
Conversion Wizards is a consultancy that offers conversion rate optimization, performance marketing, and business intelligence services. They have also worked with brands like Microsoft Office, Virgin, Nike, Cotopaxi, The Washington Post and 100+ smaller online sellers and SaaS companies.
Rotoballer Background
Rotoballer.com is a leader in fantasy sports content. Their in-depth research can significantly improve a player’s odds of winning, just like studying companies can make you a more informed stock market investor. Bootstrapped by two childhood friends Leor Rabe and Alex Roberts, the company is profitable, growing at almost 100% year over year, and challenging much larger institutional incumbents.
Rotoballer makes most of their money from display ads, but they also have a premium subscription product that they’d like to grow. The challenge is increasing the conversion rate on the paid product without cannibalizing advertising revenue.
To conduct a Conversion Rate Optimization Audit, Rotoballer engaged The Conversion Wizards, who provided actionable improvements described below.
Analysis Summary
The Conversion Wizards used both CRO best practices and insights from Microsoft Clarity, focusing on three dimensions: Value Proposition, Friction and Anxiety. They conducted the analysis on mobile as it accounts for 70%+ of traffic.
Value Proposition: Why Should I Click Through the Premium Offer?
Above on the left is a screenshot of Rotoballer’s homepage (mobile version). On the right is a Clarity heatmap overlaid.
The first thing Conversion Wizards noticed was the small number of people clicking through to the premium tools and subscription page. If Rotoballer wants to rely less on ad revenue, more people must see the premium offer. And for more people to see it, they must first click on the areas leading to it, shown below.
As shown above, the areas leading to the premium tools have little heat and few clicks!
Interestingly, right below the banner on the left is the most-clicked element. This element received 41% of all clicks despite being towards the bottom, so the problem with the banners isn’t simply that they are lower on the page.
To address this problem, Conversion Wizards suggested some optimizations:
Reinforce the value each visitor receives: The header, “Gain an Unfair Advantage & Win Big,” is then backed by “FantasyPros certified top-accuracy NFL rankers.” People engage in fantasy sports to win and earn bragging rights among their friends. Connecting directly with this motivation is better than simply stating that you have premium tools.
High visibility. The CTA is placed right beneath one of the highest clicked areas and a brighter color should get more attention. The element really pops, begging to be clicked.
Promise immediate gratification (“Get Instant Access”). Selling the click for the premium product to be seen.
Invoke curiosity. The line, “These two certified rankers,” piques curiosity and entices some users to click simply to find out who they are. From testing, this strategy creates intrigue and higher clickthrough.
Conversion Wizards also recommended testing a minimized version of this reminder as a floating footer on mobile.
Friction: Reducing Difficulty of Taking the Desired Action
Conversion Wizards define friction as an aggregation of all the length and difficulty-related aggravation factors that occur throughout the conversion process.
Examples of friction on Rotoballer’s site include:
Difficult to find/see upgrade CTAs because they look like the ads on the page.
No clear navigation or guidance on where the user should navigate next. The first page of a site should quickly answer these three questions:
Where am I? (who is Rotoballer and what do they do)
What action should I take?
Why should I take it with Rotoballer? (vs. some other fantasy sports site?)
On-page CTAs and links don’t provide context or set clear expectations for what happens once a user clicks on them
No clear hierarchy within the website’s layout to communicate relative importance and guide users where to look first. Conversion Wizards call this “allowing visitors to engage in unsupervised thinking,” a problematic source of friction.
To address these issues, Conversion Wizards suggested using a contrasting color to highlight the premium offering. This quick solution led to 3x more clicks on the premium button.
In the first screenshot below, the red color blended with site content and got 0.06% of clicks. The second used a bright yellow which increased this number to 0.19%.
Anxiety: Anticipate a User’s Concerns and Address Them
Unaddressed questions and concerns can cause anxiety, a conversion killer. To effectively reduce anxiety, Conversion Wizards suggest anticipating a user’s questions and concerns at each step and overcorrectingwith specificity and proximity.
Using a stronger and more prominent guarantee at the point of purchase was one way Conversion Wizards suggested reducing anxiety. Below is a screenshot of the purchase area with the weak guarantee.
Compare that with a stronger, money-back guarantee which can increase conversion rates by more than 2x, net-net i.e. the rise in purchases more than offsets the refund requests.
Two other ways Conversion Wizards suggested reducing anxiety were reinforcing the value proposition close to the point of purchase and using a “value positive” call-to-action.
The second treatment reminds the buyer they are about to “gain an unfair advantage”. In a previous project, a similar reminder led to a 29% lift in credit-card gated free trials.
Another suggestion like the mockup above is a call-to-action that connects with the visitor’s primary motivation—winning and bragging rights. An additional recommendation is reassuring them with the text “easily cancel anytime”. The Wall Street Journal famously ran a test where adding just this text to their paywall increased subscriptions by 9.8%
Further Clarity Analysis: QuickBacks (Possible Friction)
Quick backs tell users when a visitor navigates to a page then quickly returns to the previous one. In CRO, this can be a clue that a link or button may not set proper expectations for what the visitor will see next.
In the example above, the visitor is searching for “NHL DFS Picks” but goes to “More DFS Articles” instead of “DFS Picks Articles” where the correct link is available. Other recordings showed similar issues.
This informs users that the overall navigation flow and structure need to be addressed.
Conclusion
This case study was a look into Clarity from a CRO perspective by examining value proposition, friction, and anxiety. Conversion Wizards used the tool to provide key insights that Rotoballer used to increase clickthrough rates.
“As a long-time Conversion Rate Optimization practitioner, I was excited to discover Clarity. It is 100% free, does not cap sessions and has interesting new features like Conversion Heatmaps for ecommerce. Now even the tiniest businesses can get rich insights without worrying about costs”
Jasper Kuria, Managing Partner, The Conversion Wizards.
