Were you ever curious about what your users were doing on specific page? What if you could actually watch them on your site?
Well, you can. There are tools out there that will record sessions for you on your website, but there is one that will do it for free and also provide you with free heatmaps.
It’s Microsoft Clarity.
https://clarity.microsoft.com/
Microsoft Clarity was released about a year ago, and it is completely free.
Session recordings are exactly like they sound. You can see where a visitor scrolls. You can see what they click on.
One thing to note, Clarity does not record every session. It is a random sampling of sessions.
Heatmaps do not show you individual sessions but will compile data and visually display to you where visitors scroll to and what people are clicking on.
It’s very similar to what HotJar offers, except Microsoft Clarity is 100% free.
I will say, because everyone is obsessed with speed these days, installing Microsoft Clarity will impact your Pagespeed. It’s another script running just like Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel. How big of an impact it has will largely depend on your web hosting. It should not be drastic.
Because it is yet another script running, I do not run it 24/7 or on every page.
The way I use Clarity is I install it on Tag Manager and just update the trigger to add the URLs I want it running on. I’ll run it when we launch a new page or when we want to collect data on a page we believe should be performing better.
You can also install it by adding the code directly to a page, but this is an example of where the diversity of Tag Manager makes things easier for you. It is so much easier to just update a trigger on a tag than it is to go into individual pages and update code.
If you are stuck working with developers, even more reason to use Tag Manager. If you wanted to install Clarity on 5 pages, you might be waiting a week or two for a developer to get it done. With Tag Manager, you can have this done in 10 minutes.
