What is Microsoft Clarity?

Clarity is a cutting-edge behavioral analysis tool that assists you in understanding user interaction on your website. You can improve your website for your clients and business by utilizing Clarity’s powerful analysis tools.

Clarity also provides heatmaps and session recordings, allowing website owners to see how users interact with specific page elements like buttons and links. This data can enhance the user experience and boost conversion rates. One of Microsoft Clarity’s key advantages is its integration with other Microsoft products, including Azure and Office 365. It allows website owners to quickly access and analyze their data as part of their overall business strategy.

6 Key features of MS Clarity 

Dashboards and Metrics: Dashboard metrics are techniques and measurements that use to create digital displays of your collected data. These displays include charts, graphs, tables, and percentages to assist you in understanding a specific area of a corporation.

Session replay: Clarity records users’ actions on your website and allows you to replay them to see how they interacted with your site.

Heatmaps: MS Clarity generates heatmaps that show where users click and scroll on your website, helping you understand how they engage with your content.

Funnel analysis: Clarity allows you to create and track user journeys through your website, helping you recognize how users navigate your site and where they are dropping off.

Form analytics: MS Clarity tracks how users interact with forms on your website, helping you understand where they are having difficulties and identify opportunities for improvement.

User segmentation: It allows you to segment your users based on a range of criteria, such as location, device type, and referral source, so you can get different user interactions on your website.

Microsoft Clarity provides a range of crucial features that can help you understand how users interact with your website and classify prospects for optimization and development.

Installation and configuration of Microsoft Clarity 

Signing up for Clarity and creating a ‘project’ is required to get your tracking up. After that, you must incorporate the tracking code into your website.

There is no Clarity WordPress plugin available at the time of writing. Instead, you’ll have to copy-paste the tracking script into your site template or use a third-party system to manage it, such as Google Tag Manager.

In any case, the core Clarity script is straightforward – just one block of code to copy and paste into the page, and you’re good to go.

Microsoft Clarity vs. HotJar

Clarity and HotJar, the market session recording tools, also have much in common. HotJar has been around for a long time and has developed a feature-rich product for session recording, heat mapping, and user feedback.

However, HotJar does not offer the same types of metrics as Clarity. It lacks an ‘overview’ and Clarity’s ingenious metrics. We wouldn’t recommend swapping one for the other – in either case.

Again, both of these runs together. Unfortunately, there is no simple way to connect them. You’ll need to do custom coding or use a platform like Google Tag Manager to interact with them. However, HotJar handles custom events and tagging nearly identical to Clarity’s, so there’s room to apply the same filters.

Microsoft Clarity vs. Google Analytics                           

Although there are some impressive metrics and reports, it’s clear that Clarity needs to be more feature-rich to serve as your primary analytics tool. These elements are especially true if your site has multiple goals, active marketing campaigns, and many moving parts.

However, you can use both tools concurrently. They can even be linked together with a few clicks. Once enabled, Clarity sends data back to Google Analytics. This let you see which Clarity recordings are connected to Google Analytics sessions. You get ‘the best of both’ platforms this way.

Considerations about MS Clarity 

Privacy & consent

Clarity conceals the details of a significant amount of information by default, just in case it contains sensitive data.

By Clarity, most numbers, images, form contents, and other elements are automatically hidden in all recordings and Heatmaps. That means you’re unlikely to save someone’s address or credit card information. That’s an excellent job because, there is currently no way for users to opt out of this tracking, nor is there a way to delete individual recordings without deleting your entire account.

If you believe certain content areas are viewable, handle what Clarity hides or reveals by adding HTML attributes to those elements. 

It’s free and open source

Clarity is a new product, and there is still much to be done before it is ready for widespread or commercial. Therefore, while writing, some elements need to be added, ‘coming soon’ notices and only partial documentation. 

However, Clarity, or the technology that powers it, is open source. Individuals and organizations who have felt ‘trapped’ in Google Analytics will band in to bring Clarity up to speed.

At the very least, it’ll be interesting to watch the product, and its roadmap evolves and contributes.

Final Observation

Even with significant feature overlap, Clarity differs from Google Analytics and HotJar. Nevertheless, it combines some of the best features and introduces novel metrics.

Even with Clarity’s introduction, we recommend creating an account and investigating where your site may be causing rage clicks and excessive scrolling.

At this point, the only drawbacks we see are a requirement for more ‘comparison’ methods. When discovering the data and significant privacy concerns about whether it’s ‘okay’ to store customer behavior videos at scale.