Places for People

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.

Before
After

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Segmenting tools are excellent and they now set up segments whenever possible.
  4. 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

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