Clarity from Microsoft is a relatively new, free analytics tool for customer journeys that provides statistics on website usage, session recordings and heatmaps. It has little in common with Google Analytics (and other analytics platforms). But it is robust, easy to use and has some interesting features. [toc]
What is Microsoft Clarity?
Clarity records information about the users who visit your website and how they behave. It summarizes this information in the form of dashboards and allows you to explore and highlight interesting segments and behaviors.
MS Clarity provides basic information about sessions, interactions and engagement and breaks down users by device type, country and other dimensions. For all of these views, you can explore heatmaps and session recordings. These recordings can help you better understand your users and their problems. You can use these insights to improve your website. For more information about MS Clarity, read on to learn more about the highlights and features of Clarity.
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Key features and reports
Dashboards and metrics
As you would expect from an analytics tool, Clarity offers a comprehensive overview in the form of a dashboard. It contains all the usual metrics you would expect: Number of sessions, total users, page view details and the like. Surprisingly, the dashboard lacks some of the metrics you would expect to see in such a tool. There's no 'bounce rate', no 'conversation rate' and none of the tables you might be used to from tools like Google Analytics. You also can't compare performance across multiple date ranges or segments.
Here is a short list of metrics you have as an example:
- Sessions
- Pages per session
- Scroll depth
- Popular pages
- Referrers
- Breakdown by device
- Breakdown by operating system
- Breakdown by browser
- Breakdown by country
In addition to the usual metrics, MS Clarity tries to provide some clever insights. In particular, it tries to find out when users encounter friction:
- Dead clicks - the user has clicked on a page without doing anything.
- Rage clicks - the user has clicked quickly on the same small area.
- Excessive scrolling - the user scrolls through a page more than expected.
- Quick backs - the user navigates to a page and then quickly returns to the previous page.
- JavaScript errors - the percentage of sessions that have JavaScript errors.
Special reports such as "Rage clicks" and "Excessive scrolling" show which users were confused or annoyed. These reports are a great way to find out where your website is letting your users down. Fixing these issues can be a great way to improve engagement, reduce bounce rate and increase conversion rate.
Recording the session
One of the great attractions of Clarity is that all sessions are recorded. Clarity logs the mouse movements, scrolling and clicks of every visitor to the website. These can be viewed and replayed at any time in the future. The official Clarity video below shows what this looks like in action:
Each of the dashboard panels offers links to these video recordings. You can view recordings of popular pages, frustrated users or specific browsers.
Clickmaps & heatmaps
Most analytics tools are good at understanding which pages users go to and leave. But it's often much harder to understand how they behave while on a particular page. Clarity's heatmaps record where users click and allow you to investigate and filter this. This type of view can help you understand what your users want and where your designs and layout might be confusing them.
The clickmaps are divided into a desktop, a tablet and a mobile version. This allows you to examine behavior by device category. The functionality is a little basic, but a future update promises more options. We also expect the introduction of scroll maps. These visualize the content users see when they scroll down the page, rather than where they click. This is a different type of data that can be very useful to understand how users navigate.
Filtering and custom tags
To get useful insights, you can use filters to see data with specific criteria. For example, you could see session recordings where users have filled out a form, or heatmaps of pages where users seem to be frustrated. Combining multiple filters can be a great way to analyze user behavior and solve problems.
Filtering only becomes really powerful when you use user-defined tags. With just a few clicks, you can filter users relevant to you at session or page level. With a little code, you can send additional information (Java script triggers) to Clarity via Google Tag Manager. This information can relate to the page the user is on, to the user themselves, to the weather or to anything else. Once you've fired these tags, you can filter your reports to see metrics, session recordings and heatmaps for sessions and pages where they were fired. A good use case for custom tags is tracking 'conversion events' on your website, such as when users make a purchase, register an account or fill out a form. Less obvious but equally useful filters include tracking whether the user is logged in or what type of page they are viewing. With this tracking, you can filter your dashboards and reports to see how certain users have behaved. Unfortunately, there is no way to compare filtered data (with all data or with other filtered data). This means, for example, that you are not able to compare the "conversion rate" between different custom tags. You can find more about how custom tags work and sample code in the Clarity documentation "Filters".
What Clarity is not...
It is clear that Clarity is not a comprehensive all-in-one analytics platform. But that's not a bad thing. In fact, from our perspective, it seems to be a deliberate design decision. It's not trying to be everything. It's trying to be a session recording tool, a heat mapping tool, and a user behavior overview tool. And that focus helps it do a good job. Because of these limitations, you should think twice before ditching all your other tracking tools. Here's why:
It's not a replacement for Google Analytics
It's clear that despite some interesting metrics and reports, Clarity isn't comprehensive enough to serve as your primary analytics tool. This is especially true if you have a complex website with multiple goals, active marketing campaigns and many moving parts. But you can use both tools side by side. They can even be linked together with a few clicks. Once activated, MS Clarity passes information to Google Analytics. This allows you to see which Clarity recordings are linked to one of your Google Analytics sessions. This way you get the best of both platforms. Ideally, the setup should always be done via Google Tag Manager!
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It is not a replacement for HotJar
There is also a lot of overlap between Clarity and the industry-leading session recording tool, HotJar. HotJar has been around for a long time and has developed a feature-rich product for session recording, heat mapping and collecting user feedback.
However, HotJar does not offer the same metrics as Clarity. It lacks an "overview" and the clever frustration metrics of MS Clarity are not available. We wouldn't recommend replacing one with the other either way. They are different tools with different uses. And again, both can be used in parallel. Unfortunately, there is no simple interface to connect them. You have to program them yourself or use a platform like Google Tag Manager to make them work together. The way HotJar handles custom events and tags is almost identical to that of Clarity, so it's definitely possible to apply the same filters and tags in both programs.
Installing and configuring Microsoft Clarity
To get your tracking up and running, you need to log in to Clarity and create a "project". Then you need to add the tracking code to your website. The tracking script should always be used via the Google Tag Manager.
Other considerations
Data protection and consent
You may have noticed in Clarity's demo video (or if you've played around with it yourself) that it's very careful about hiding sensitive data. Clarity hides the details of a lot of content by default, just in case it contains sensitive information.
Most numbers, images, form content and more are automatically hidden in all records and heatmaps. This means that it is very unlikely that you will accidentally save someone's address or credit card details. This is a good thing, because there is currently no way to prevent this tracking and delete individual recordings without deleting your entire account. If certain content areas are hidden that you think should not be displayed, you can control what MS Clarity hides or displays by adding HTML attributes to these elements. You can find more detailed information on this on the help page. For comparison: HotJar has only recently activated this type of "masking function" by default and is much less "rigorous" than Clarity. Clarity has certainly made an effort to be privacy-conscious, even though it stores data and videos from individual user sessions.
If you have concerns about how MS Clarity collects, stores or hides data, you should definitely read Clarity's privacy FAQs. Depending on the structure of your own website, tracking, users and local laws, you should also seek legal advice.
It is open source
MS Clarity is a fairly new product, and there is certainly still work to be done before it is ready for widespread or commercial use. At the time of writing, features are still missing, there are hints of an imminent release and the documentation is only partial. But MS Clarity - or at least the technology on which it is based - is open source. You can view (and contribute to!) the source code at github.com/microsoft/clarity. We'd like this to mean that individuals and organizations who feel "trapped" by Google Analytics will band together to bring Clarity up to speed. At the very least, it will be interesting to watch the evolution of the product and its roadmap, and participate in the conversations and decisions.
Conclusion
Although there is a lot of overlap in features, Clarity is very different from Google Analytics and HotJar. It has some of the best features of both and brings some interesting new metrics to the table. Since it's so easy to get it up and running, we recommend you set up an account and find out where your website is causing "Rage clicks" and "Excessive scrolling". The only drawbacks we see at this stage are the lack of comparison techniques when examining the data. We'd like to see a version with more control over video recording (perhaps opt-in only) that includes the clever frustration metrics. Maybe we'll see you in the open source code repository on GitHub suggesting these very controls?