Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
Microsoft Clarity is a behaviour analytics tool which allows users to gain insights into how their website is being viewed. In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about Microsoft Clarity, including what different tools and metrics you can use and why you should be using these to improve website performance.
Why is Clarity important?
While raw data tools such as Google Analytics 4 are good for letting you see how users are interacting with your site, Clarity helps you see beyond raw data into why people are interacting with pages in certain ways.
For example, while GA4 lets you see what your most popular pages are and how long people are visiting them, it doesn’t explain why people are engaging with certain content and not others. What is causing them to click on a page and leave immediately? Is it a lack of understanding of the content? Is the content not engaging enough? This is where Clarity becomes important for a deeper understanding. Clarity allows you to use tools such as heatmaps and session recordings to understand why your content is performing how it is, combined with Clarity’s behavioural metrics, which highlight pain points for users.
Behaviour metrics
There are a few different behavioural metrics you can track with Clarity that show different pain points that users are having with your site,
- Rage clicks – Users rapidly clicked or tapped in the same small area
- Dead clicks – Users clicked or tapped on the page with no effect
- Excessive scrolling – User scrolled through a page more than expected
- Quick backs – User navigated to a page, then quickly returned to the previous one
These metrics allow you to see exactly which areas of the page are causing your users frustration and update accordingly to improve the user experience. You can also see, using some of the tools available, what points of your page are having a positive impact on users, causing them to remain on your site and potentially convert.
Heatmap, Session Recording and Insight Tools
Heatmaps incorporate the behavioural metrics we’ve spoken about while also showing an overall click map of the site, as we mentioned, this is important for understanding how users interact with the content because it shows both the good and the bad of how users view your content, allowing you to adjust accordingly.
Session recording tools are slightly different as they are live videos that allow you to watch how users are interacting with the pages in real time, including how quickly they abandon certain pages or see how they get confused by certain pages and content.
Clarity has an AI feature tool that collates data points from your heatmaps and session recordings to highlight different successes and failures on your website and allow for improvements.
Using Microsoft Clarity gives a deeper understanding of user behaviour and is an important tool for SEOs wanting to make considered improvements to their website’s content for optimisation purposes.
