How to Analyze the User Behavior Using Microsoft Clarity

If you are a website owner (especially online shop owners), it’s very important to analyze the user behavior (user insights) and predict the trends, habits, and preferences of users. Thus, website owners can have suitable business and marketing strategies to reach their potential customers and their requirements. In this article, we’re going to analyze user behavior using Microsoft Clarity.

This tool gives you a lot of information such as:

• Basic statistics that Google Analytics has such as session, pages per session, the device / browser / operating system which users are using, …;
• Other statistics that only Microsoft Clarity has such as Scroll depth, Quick backs, Engagement, Rage clicks, Dead clicks, …;
• Record the users’ behaviors;
• Heatmaps determine.

And there are many other great features that I’m going to introduce right now. But first, you need to install the Microsoft Clarity tool:

Install Microsoft Clarity

Note: If you’re using a Cache plugin for your website, you should clear all the Cache data to help Microsoft Clarity verify your website faster. Otherwise, it will take a few more hours.

Step 1: Sign Up for an Account

First, sign up for a Microsoft Clarity account:

On your Microsoft Clarity account page, create a new project:

After finishing it, the Setup section will show up. This time, Microsoft Clarity will give you a tracking code. We need to insert this code into your WordPress website in the next step, click Copy to clipboard to save it.

Step 2: Add the Tracking Code into the Website

Adding the Microsoft Clarity tracking code is almost like inserting the Google Analytics tracking code. You just need to copy and paste the tracking code into the Header section of your WordPress website. You can manually edit the code in the theme, use a plugin, or use Google Tag Manager.

I use Slim SEO plugin because it has a feature to insert code to the Header section easily. This plugin is free and available on wordpress.org, so you can install and activate it right on the Dashboard.

Read more about how to install and activate a WordPress plugin here.

After finishing it, go to Settings > Slim SEO > Code. Press Ctrl + V to paste the tracking code into the Header Code section, then drag to the bottom and click Save Changes.

The tracking code has been added to your WordPress website, and the data will be sent to the Microsoft Clarity tool for analysis.

The User Behavior / Insights Statistics Providing by Microsoft Clarity

After adding the tracking code, you have to wait about two hours for Microsoft Clarity to get the data about the user behavior / insights. After two hours or more, go back to Microsoft Clarity and log into your account, a new interface will show up like this:

As you can see, Microsoft Clarity has four tabs:

• Dashboard: includes all statistics about the user behavior / insights on the website.
• Recordings: record the users' route on your website into video.
• Heatmaps: visually track the customer's click / scroll frequency through a heatmap. With this map, you can identify where users are interested in and often interact with.
• Settings: set up Microsoft Clarity.

Let me show you each tab:

Dashboard Tab - General Statistics

Note: hover the (i) sign to have more information about the statistics or know what they are.

Along with familiar statistics such as sessions, pages per session, country, browser, device, etc., which you may know in Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity focuses on providing other interesting stats related to the users’ interactions on the website. Eg:

• Scroll depth: show you how far the customers often scroll. On average, customers scroll to 30.42% length of a page then stop. It means that most people don’t have enough patience to go to the Footer section.
• Engagement: how long the customer's mouse is active / inactive.
• Quick backs: the ratio of the clicks that the user goes back quickly to the original page. Maybe they found the link irrelevant / ineffective.
• Excessive scrolling: the ratio of scrolling that users scroll up and down many times (it means that they have to scroll back to review because the content is difficult to read or because they can't find what they want).
• Rage clicks: the ratio of clicks that the user clicks on one place many times (probably because of small icons, or the late response).
• Dead clicks: the ratio of clicks that the user clicks on a place but there is no response from the website. It means that the button / link is broken, late responding, or the location makes customers confused.

I’ve just explained some complex stats. If you want to get detailed information, check out the Microsoft Clarity documentation.

Recordings Tab - Record the Users’ Behaviors

The Recordings feature allows you to review the entire process that customers interact with your website in a session. Note that Microsoft Clarity captures the FULL PROCESS of EACH SESSION into video, so you can choose whichever session you want to watch (1). To fast-forward the video, you can customize the speed (2) or choose to automatically skip the parts that the user doesn’t interact with (3).

This feature records even when users enter their personal information such as email or phone number. In the Settings tab, you can choose whether to record this information or hide it (I will explain more in the next section of this post).

Heatmaps Tab - Mouse Click / Scroll Chart

With the Heatmaps feature, you can see where users often click or scroll. Everything is displayed on an intuitive and easy-to-follow heatmap. Click / scroll frequency is represented by color. The frequency gradually increases from green to red.

Settings Tab - Set Up Microsoft Clarity

In this tab, there are two sections that you need to pay attention to. They are Masking and IP blocking.

Masking

In the Masking Mode section, you can choose to mask content that users enter on the website so that their information is invisible in the Recordings section. You have three options here:

• Strict: hide all the text that users enter.
• Balanced: only hide sensitive information such as emails or phone numbers.
• Relaxed: don’t hide.

Normally, you should choose the Balanced option.

IP blocking

In the IP blocking section, you can require Microsoft Clarity not to track and analyze the user actions from a certain IP address.

Click Block IP address, name the IP address. Then, enter the IP address and click Add. For example, I blocked my company IP because I want to exclude stats from people in my company.

Last Words

Overall, Microsoft Clarity is a worthwhile and effective user behavior analysis tool. My favorite feature of Microsoft Clarity is Heatmaps, which shows the click / scroll ratio intuitively and clearly. Moreover, we have a lot of stats in one place with Microsoft Clarity, which we have to find in several other analyzing tools.

Besides analyzing user behavior, to have a high-converting website, you also need to speed up your website and protect important data to improve the user experience.