Microsoft announces a free website analytics tool, Clarity

Microsoft recently announced a user-behaviour analytics tool that is free and GDPR compliant called Clarity.

Clarity aims to provide relevant data and insights to webmasters and help them understand how visitors interact with their website, while respecting the privacy of the users.

The best part about Clarity — apart from it being free — is that there are no traffic caps. It is also said to be properly optimised so it won’t slow down websites.

According to Microsoft, “Clarity is designed to have a very low impact on page load times, so you can make sure users navigating to your site won’t have to wait for pages to load.

Additionally, we don’t place any caps on your traffic so whether you get 10 visitors per day or 1,000,000, Clarity will be able to handle your traffic with no additional cost for you.”

Main features

The three big top-level features of Microsoft Clarity are:

• Heatmaps
• Insights dashboard
• Session playbacks

Heatmaps, as the name suggests, shows where website visitors clicked on different pages on your site. It shows where most of the visitors are concentrating most on your web page. You can use this information to redesign your web page or move around the most important elements, such as the CTA. Heatmaps also show you how far people scroll down your pages.

Insights dashboard gives you an overview of your site’s performance and various user behaviour metrics, such as sessions, pages per session, popular pages, operating systems and browsers, etc.

Microsoft describes the Insights dashboard as:

“We provide a dashboard of aggregated metrics to help you get an overall understanding of the traffic on your site. At a glance, you will be able to see how many users were clicking on non-existent links or how many people scrolled up and down a page in search of something they couldn’t readily find.”

Session playback is an interesting feature that allows website owners to replay site visitor web page visits. This allows them to view where their mouse cursors clicked, where they scrolled, where they paused, and any subsequent clicks on links on a page.

There are different filters available for website owners to narrow down the information.

Microsoft Clarity is now available.  You can learn more about it in the official Bing announcement blog post.