Microsoft launched their visual web analytics tool, called Clarity, back in October 2020. Now, with a few months of use under the belt, this tool is an excellent option for developers and non-technical people alike.

Clarity is an easy and free-to-use analytics product, built with the goal of helping website managers improve their websites by improving their understanding of their visitor’s behaviour. In simple terms, the information provided by Clarity can help site developers make more informed decision on what areas of their site may need changing.

While the UI is intuitive, simple and easy to use for beginners, the information Clarity provides is surprisingly in depth. Clarity has three core features right now, Session Playback, Insights and Heatmaps.

Session Playback

Clarity session recordings mean you can watch user sessions back one-by-one. This feature allows you to see where your visitor looked on your site, what they clicked, where their mouse went and much more.  

The filters you can use allow you to be awfully specific as to what kind of sessions you want to see and the machine learning means Clarity can track features it has called “rage clicks”, “dead clicks” and “excessive scrolling”.

Rage clicks are when a user rapidly clicks multiple times in the same area, perhaps indicating an area of the site they believe should link somewhere but does not. Dead clicks are simply clicks on the page that have no effect. Excessive scrolling is simply when a user scrolls more than the machine learning expects them too.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps within Clarity provide lots of informative information in a way that is easy to digest for even the most non-technical of readers. The heatmaps automatically segments their data via device type, meaning you can drill down into what sections of your device over or underperform on specific devices. Currently, Clarity supports two forms of heatmaps, clickmaps and scrollmaps.

Clickmaps aggregate all the clicks on your site so that you can see what sections of your site are most popular and what clickable links are potentially over performing.

Scrollmaps can help you identify how far down your page users make it on average, meaning you can find out whether your visitors are seeing the important information you need them to see.

Insights

This dashboard of aggregate metrics allows you to get an overall understanding of the traffic on your site. While not a fully fledged analytics tool, it gives you a great overview into some interesting data such as how many users were clicking on non-existent links or how many people were scrolling up and down for something they could not find.

Microsoft Clarity is free to use and easy to install – simply place the code into the header of your site. As stated, while it’s not a fully fledged analytics tool in its own right, the features it does offer provide a really great compliment to some of the other analytics tools available.