Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is a free tool that helps you understand how people use your website. It shows you what parts of your site get the most attention, where people click or scroll, and how they navigate through your pages. It also lets you watch Session Recordings of real users browsing your site, so you can see what works well and what needs improvement.

All sites on the Sky Websites platform are now integrated with Microsoft Clarity, so there will already be lots of data that is being gathered about how users interact with your site that you can start to analyse.

It's important to note that Microsoft Clarity works by dropping cookies on a user's device, and therefore Clarity will not gather data for any user that doesn't consent to those cookies. There are also settings in place to ensure that no personally identifiable data is captured by Clarity at all, so for instance any input fields will be masked automatically when you view Session Recordings

To Login to Microsoft Clarity, go to https://clarity.microsoft.com/projects - if you don't already have access, please contact the Sky Websites team: DL-Sky-Websites-Developers@sky.uk

Dashboard

When you open Microsoft Clarity you are shown a Dashboard giving some key observations about your users, such as the number of Sessions it has gathered, the average pages per session, average scroll depth, and average length of time spent on the site.

Further down the Dashboard, you can see more in-depth metrics like the percentage of users who encountered a dead link, the percentage of users did a quick back (when they open a page then quickly press 'back'), or the proportion of users that did 'rage clicks' where they quickly click on something repeatedly.

Then towards the bottom there are statistics about the most common pages users visited, where they were referred from, and what technology they used.

By default the Dashboard is set to show all users over the last 3 days.

Filters and creating Segments

You can use the Filters option at the top to change the view of the Dashboard and drill down into the data. There are options to change the dates that the Dashboard is covering, or filter the view to show only users with certain device types, or based on the activity of users.

When you set a Filter, you have the option to save this view as a 'Segment' so you can quickly re-use that Filter later. Good examples that you can create are separate Segments for users on Desktop or Mobile devices, or a Segment users that go to a particular section of your site. You can be as broad or specific as you like by adding multiple criteria to your Filters.

Microsoft Clarity automatically saves Session Recordings for users, so you can observe how users interact with your site.

You can access Session Recordings from specific Segments that you have saved by selecting the Segment, and then going to the 'Recordings' tab.

The list of Recordings will appear on the left-hand side, and you can sort these by how recent they are, session duration, the number of clicks, or the number of pages visited in the session.

Selecting a Recording on the left to start playing it. There's a useful option for 'Skip Inactivity' which you can enable that will skip any parts of the recording where the user had simply left the website open for a period of time without interacting with it.

The timeline on the Recording will also show markers for events like navigating to a new page. For Desktop users you can see the trail of where their mouse goes, and for mobile users you can see them tap and scroll on the screen.

Alongside each Session there is an option to see more details about that specific user, and see if there are further Recordings for other Sessions they had on your site. Each user is given a unique ID so you can even Save them as a Segment if you want to go back later and see more Sessions from the same user.

There is also an 'Insights' button which will automatically generate a summary of what happened during the Session, and what observations and assumptions Clarity may have noticed about them.

You can also view Heatmaps for pages, and similarly to the Recordings these are filtered by the Segment you select.

When you select the 'Heatmaps' option from the top menu, you will be shown a list of the most popular pages in the Segment you've selected. Clicking on a Page will open up a Heatmap, showing the most popular parts of the Page that users have clicked on.

On the left-hand side is an ordered list of the most popular items that have been clicked, and this is presented visually with a Heatmap on the right-hand side.

Notice that whilst you're in a Heatmap for a Page, the Filter that you have selected will have changed to just show users in your selected Segment who have clicked on that particular Page. You have the option to save this as an additional Segment if you like.

You can also select an item from the list of the most clicked elements on the left, and this will add an additional filter for only users that have selected that element. This again can be saved as a Segment, for instance if you want to dive deeper into the behaviour of those users.