You Ask, I Answer: Microsoft Clarity vs. Google Analytics?

In today's episode, Caroline asks, what's better than Google Analytics to measure what your visitors are actually doing when on your website. So there's a ton of really good uh software packages out there that do stuff like this. Uh there's ClickTail, there's Crazy Egg, uh Lucky Orange. Uh but the one that I've been playing with most recently that does a really good job, keeps it simple, and uh is also free, is from this little company you might have heard of called Microsoft. Uh they released this package called Microsoft Clarity.

Um that a lot of people when it first was announced were incorrectly comparing it to Google Analytics, calling it a Google Analytics killer. It's not. Um it is a very different application than Google Analytics. Uh what it is is a uh hot jar killer, or at the very least, a worthy competitor to all those different companies I just mentioned. Uh A, because it's Microsoft, so you know that it, you know, while the product itself could be discontinued, the company's probably not going anywhere.

Uh and B, it's free. You know, can't really complain about that. So um, what is this thing and how do we use it with our website? Let's go ahead and uh move things around here. Okay, so what you've probably noticed in Google Analytics is that uh there's actually not a whole lot of useful stuff in Google Analytics for looking at your site.

What you need is something that can track the interactions that users are having on your site. So that's where clarity comes in. Setting it up, very straightforward. It is like every single other uh tracking program. Uh is you just uh put your tracking uh pixel on your site.

I used Google Tag Manager to do it, and it was pretty straightforward. Let's go ahead and connect uh my site here. And now I've got my Google Analytics integration there. Uh now, let's go to the dashboard and see what this does. You do get some basic analytics, and that's nice.

Um, you can see uh you know, sessions and and things like that, but again, there's no things in here that are specified like goals and goal completions and all that stuff. You're not gonna get that level of detail. Um, what you do get though is a lot of UI stuff, user interface stuff, uh, dead clicks where people are clicking on parts of the page that they think should do something and don't. Uh, you get rage clicks, which I appreciate. Uh people just rapidly clicking on the same uh space, excessive scrolling.

These are good indicators that people are lost, right? There's something wrong with your site. And then you get to scroll down and see uh pages that you know people have gone back on, uh pages with JavaScript errors that you might want to fix up. Like all the other user experience tools, you get uh recordings and heat maps. So recordings are pretty straightforward.

You go in, you tap on the recording, and then you get to watch somebody navigating your website and see what it is that they do. Um this will give you hints, you know. For example, like, oh, this person uh maybe isn't reading the the fullest part of the article, things like that. If I skip forward here, they're what are they doing? Oh, they're trying to copy and paste.

It looks like yep, they're trying to copy and paste uh text from uh my site. Um that's interesting. And then in addition to recordings, you of course get the uh heat maps, right? Where are people clicking on your page, and you get a chance to see uh those clicks, uh what people are doing on your site. Let's go back to our dashboard here.

As far as I can tell, there aren't any uh significant limits or restrictions yet, but even if there were, just out of the box, this isn't bad, right? It's simple, it's straightforward, it tells you very quickly, hey, there's either things wrong with your website or there's not. I'm not terribly concerned about the dead click stuff as we were seeing um just now. People were actually trying to copy and paste text, uh, which is interesting. Um I think uh I'll just give some thought about uh about that.

Um and then things like JavaScript errors, okay. That's something I need to fix. Right? If they're if people are running into issues on my site where JavaScript is spitting up on them, uh I probably need to go ahead and and do some investigation and tune that up. Uh again, with any of these diagnostics, uh, you can either click in on just that part of the audience, right?

Uh you can see like you know, 15% of those br people who had JavaScript errors had Chrome issues or were on Chrome. Let's go ahead and look at uh Safari, Apple users. It only had 8% uh of that, so Safari Fair is a little bit better. But this is a fairly handy tool. Now here's the catch with a tool like this.

Um it could as with everything is spitting up a lot of information. So the number one thing we have to do is be very clear what is it that we're trying to find out. Are we trying to find out that um conversions are down on a specific page? If so, you know, find that page in our list of pages and uh or uh just use the uh the filters to to identify which particular pages you might want. Uh and you can see there's tons and tons of different filters you can use.

Um are we looking for user experience problems? Are we dealing with a retention problem where people are are leaving quickly? Uh for example, we have this quickbacks here where uh it is people who navigate to a page and then and left quickly. Okay, let's take a look at that. What pages are they to start with, and then you could watch the recordings and say, ah, you know, they either, based on what they're doing on screen, they either did or they didn't find what they were looking for.

So with a tool like this, we've got to be clear about what it is that we want to know and what it is that what our goal is, what decisions we're gonna make. Because it's a fun tool, right? Uh you can spend a lot of time in here. But you can also waste a lot of time, right? And if you don't have time to waste, um, have to be very clear about what decision you want to make.

When you look at each of these things, what is the decision that is in here? Dead clicks, right? Your decision you're looking trying to make is do I need to add navigation to my site because something is unclear, right? Do I need to change the formatting to make it clear what the clickable objects are and what are not? Um a lot of sites tend to like to you know change the color or or mask the color of hyperlinks.

Okay, maybe that's not the best idea if you're getting a lot of dead clicks. And in order to understand that, and this is where this product can run into trouble, um, we need to understand the priority of the pages we should be looking at and what issues those pages have. So, let me give you an example. Let's put uh in our URL newsletter. Okay, we're gonna apply that.

And this is my newsletter page, right? Six of the six of these visits. Click on that. Now, this is a landing page, right? This is a therefore a very important page to my site.

I want to very specifically look at this page and go, huh. Are there things here that I'm should be worried about that are are blocking conversion? But if I didn't know that, this tool would not tell me that I needed to be looking at this particular landing page. Um so you'd want to know that going into this, hey, we've got a landing page conversion problem. Maybe there's something that we can take a look at in here that tells us our landing pages are are running into trouble.

To get to that conclusion, you need to work in the in Google Analytics data. That will help you understand, okay, these are the priority pages to investigate, then come into clarity and say, now let's investigate those pages to understand why things are happening. Well, you it's sort of like a essentially watching a focus group, right? Uh or uh a one-on-one uh user interview. You can see why they're doing the things that they're doing on that page, but analytics will tell you what pages to look at, because otherwise you you'll waste hours in here now just clicking around with no clear conclusions.

So, to answer Caroline's question, what's better than Google Analytics for actually on your website? Microsoft Clarity. Um as long as you don't have any uh administrative or legal or regulated regulatory uh restrictions on installing it, I would go ahead and install it, give it a spin. Um, it doesn't cost you anything. Setting it up is as simple as setting up any other tool, and I think it's a nice compliment to Google Analytics.

I think uh especially since Google took away, you know, what little click tracking they had. I think this is a great companion to Google Analytics and use both of them. Uh you got follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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