How to Practically Apply Microsoft Clarity to Your Marketing Toolset

In this episode, host Vera Shafiq explores how marketing teams can enhance their strategies by using Microsoft Clarity in conjunction with Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Vera provides an in-depth look at the unique features of Clarity, such as session recordings and heatmaps, and discusses how these can offer a more qualitative perspective on user behavior. She also emphasizes the importance of combining quantitative data from GA4 with qualitative insights from Clarity to identify and resolve user experience issues on websites. The episode includes step-by-step guidance on implementing Clarity, prioritizing high-traffic areas, and involving cross-departmental teams for a holistic optimization approach. Finally, Vera touches on the limitations of Clarity and how it complements rather than replaces other tools in your marketing arsenal.

00:00 Welcome and Introduction

00:58 Understanding Microsoft Clarity

02:58 Combining Clarity with GA4

05:04 Key Features of Microsoft Clarity

07:05 Practical Application for Franchise Businesses

09:39 Limitations of Microsoft Clarity

11:23 Common Questions and Best Practices

13:46 Conclusion and Next Steps

Transcript

0:12

/Hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast, your go to source for real and relevant discussions on franchise business and marketing. I'm your host Vera Shafiq, and today I'm excited to share some insights on how you can amp up your marketing strategy using Microsoft Clarity. We're going to explore how Clarity works in parallel with GA4. Where Clarity truly excels and which features a CMO should have their team focus on for immediate impact. Now, if you're already using GA4 to track your website's quantitative data, like events, conversions, user flows, then you already have a strong foundation, but sometimes the numbers alone don't tell the whole story. And that's where Microsoft Clarity comes in. So let's dive into what Clarity is and how it can compliment your existing GA4 setup. So Microsoft Clarity is a free user behavior analytics tool, that provides a more qualitative look at how visitors interact with your website. So GA4 is really good at capturing numerical data, such as session duration, bounce rates, or engagement rates. Conversion metrics. Clarity, on the other hand, gives you a visual perspective. It does this through session recordings and heatmaps, which allow you to literally see how users are navigating your website. So, one thing I noticed is GA4 can be very technical, especially since the evolution of GA3 to GA4. Things have got a little bit more techie in there, and I know a lot of marketers struggled with the new version of Google Analytics, which is GA4, and so I think Microsoft Clarity fills a really kind of important gap in the need for a tool that's going to be more visual, more More, um, conducive to a marketer's point of view, and that really gives us the ability to see things as they happen and, and as I said, get more qualitative data on what's going on on the website. So if you're tracking your website performance with GA4 and you're noticing, for example, a low engagement rate on a specific landing page. GA4 will tell you what is happening, but Clarity can show you why it's happening. So by watching the session recordings, you can observe exactly how visitors are interacting with your page. Things like, you know, are they getting stuck on a confusing element or is a call to action? Maybe not drawing enough attention. Clarity can help you answer these questions by providing the why behind the numbers. So let's talk a little bit about using Microsoft Clarity in parallel with GA4. One of the most powerful strategies in digital marketing is combining quantitative data with qualitative insights. So here's how I recommend using Clarity alongside GA4. Start with the numbers. Use GA4 as your primary tool for gathering baseline metrics across your website. So you can look at KPIs like engagement rate, engaged sessions, conversion funnels, conversion rates, identify pages that might be underperforming. Then once you've pinpointed an area of concern using GA4, Switch over to clarity to get a closer look. The session recordings will help you understand user behavior in context. So for example, if a landing page is underperforming. Clarity's recordings might reveal that users are getting confused by the layout or distracted by unnecessary elements. Then I would say use Clarity heatmaps as a diagnostic tool. Heatmaps are a fantastic feature of Clarity. They visually represent where users are clicking, scrolling, and even hesitating. And this visual data can highlight which parts of your pages are engaging and which parts are being ignored. And then you'll get really some immediate insights into what you might need to rework in terms of the layout or the functionality of your website. Clarity can even flag rage clicks. So, you know, I love this feature. It's a feature where you can see where users are being frustrated. Um, essentially doing repeated clicks in frustration, right. In one place. And those are called rage clicks, or it can also show you dead clicks. So clicks on non interactive elements. And this will alert you to potential user experience issues. That might be driving those visitors away. So if you're a CMO looking to quickly boost marketing performance, uh, I would say the key features of Microsoft Clarity to focus on are. Session recordings, heat maps, rage clicks and dead clicks, and performance insight. So let's start with session recordings. This is a really cool feature. Um, session recordings, let you observe the entire user journey and you can watch real sessions, quickly spot friction points, uh, understand where users are getting stuck, identify elements that are causing frustration, and then And this kind of immediate firsthand observation can really get you, on the path to solving a lot of your UX and design problems. Next, let's talk about heat maps. Heat maps provide a visual summary of user engagement. They can show you which areas of your page receive the most attention and which pages are largely being ignored. For franchise businesses, especially where, you know, local landing pages might differ in performance. I think heat maps can help us to understand regional differences in user behavior and allow us to tweak the pages accordingly. Then let's look at rage clicks and dead clicks. So Clarity's ability to highlight rage clicks, where users are repeatedly clicking on an element out of frustration, and then the dead clicks, which are those elements that aren't interactive, can quickly usability issues. Once we address these issues, we can then, we can then reduce bounce rates and just improve overall user satisfaction. And then finally, performance insights. Although Clarity is not a full fledged performance monitoring tool, it does provide insights into page load times and responsiveness. These insights are really important because even a few seconds of a delay can significantly impact user engagement and conversions. So let's put this into a practical scenario. So you are managing the digital presence for a franchise with multiple locations. Each location has its own landing page tailored for local promotions and, um, just local content. So here's how you can leverage both GA4 and Clarity to optimize these pages. First, you're going to do a baseline analysis with GA4. You're going to start by using GA4 to collect key metrics for each local landing page. And identify which pages have lower engagement rates, lower session durations, or poor conversion rates compared with the system wide average. Then you're going to go into clarity and you're going to investigate session recordings. Um, so you're going to watch the session recordings for underperforming pages and look for common patterns. Are visitors getting confused by the layout or is there a particular section where they're hesitating or clicking repeatedly in frustration? Then in Clarity again, you're going to check out the heat maps and specifically for the low performing landing pages, you're going to see where visitors are clicking and how far down the page that are actually scrolling. And you might notice something about call to action buttons not receiving enough attention. And things that might indicate that, you know, that specific local landing page needs, uh, some, some rejiggering or some redesigning, or just a little bit of adjustment, then you're going to iterate and test. So using the insights from clarity. So if, for example, a form on one specific local landing page is causing users to drop off, maybe it's time to simplify the, the form or break it up into some more steps, um, but do something to really just implement some change on that page, and then you can use GA4 to monitor the impact and see if conversion rates went up. And then the last step, which I think is really important is to create that continuous feedback loop. So you want to create a routine where your marketing team is reviewing both the GA4 and the clarity data on a regular basis, right? So weekly or biweekly. And so this continuous feedback loop and testing loop is going to ensure that improvements are ongoing and that you're always aligning your digital presence with. The needs of your users. All right. So let's move on to some of the limitations of Clarity. So, you know, Clarity is a great tool. I highly recommend that you implement it because it is free and it really has some excellent features, um, for being a free tool that it just would be a shame if you didn't put it to use. but let's just talk about some of the drawbacks. So it's not built for deep custom event tracking like GA4 is. While it does give you a great overview of these session recordings and heat maps, if you need highly granular, tailored tracking, you will still need to rely on GA4. Then, uh, there's the data retention piece. So clarity will retain data for 90 days. And, um, so if you're looking for a long term trend analysis, then you might be limited just because of that 90 day limit. Uh, next is the advanced reporting and segmentation. So if you're looking for intricate segmentation or advanced custom dashboards or anything of that nature, clarity is somewhat basic. so it's really meant to compliment and not replace your other analytics tools. And then finally the AI features. So, you know how I love AI features. Um, unfortunately Clarity does not have too much of an AI presence currently. Uh, it has some rule based automation. It can detect those rage clicks or those dead clicks, but they're not really driven by advanced machine learning or predictive analytics. So, they're helpful alerts, but not really dynamic in the way that AI could be. And this might change, they may be adding some of this into the system, but as of now, nothing too powerful in terms of AI. One common concern is, um, do you need to watch hundreds of screen recordings to uncover the behavior patterns that we talked about? Well, the good news is no, you don't have to do that. Clarity aggregates behavior. In heat maps and allows you to filter those recordings by specific pages, devices, or types of interactions. So you could quite easily zero in on problematic areas without manually having to watch every single session. Um, and similarly, you don't need to tag individual pages. So when you are setting up clarity. It's really a simple install. It's just a matter of putting a piece of code, snippet of code on your Google Tag Manager on your website. And that snippet is going to track your entire website and monitor every page automatically. So you'll have comprehensive coverage, um, with minimal setup effort. Many marketers ask if Clarity can replace tools such as Hotjar or Crazy Egg. So Hotjar and CrazyEgg are paid tools that do a very similar thing than what Clarity does, which is those heat maps, screen recordings, uh, you know, qualitative data analysis. I would say for the core features, Clarity does a great job and it's completely free. However, Hotjar and CrazyEgg and other tools like them, which are paid, offer additional functionalities. Um, they do have things like user surveys, polls, more advanced segmentation. So if those types of features are critical to your strategy, you might still want to stay with the paid solutions or even just use them in tandem with Clarity. Another question I often get about Clarity is can Clarity do A B testing? And the answer is no. Clarity unfortunately isn't designed to run A B tests, but it is a powerful companion tool. So you would still continue to set up your A B testing using dedicated platforms like, Optimizely or VWO, and then use Clarity to visually analyze how those users are interacting with each variant. So again, it's an add on tool and it isn't, um a silver bullet to everything. All right. So let's just sum up what we talked about today and really what are the immediate steps. That CMOs or marketing leaders should be taking to integrate Microsoft Clarity into your existing marketing strategy. So I would say, first of all, since it's free and easy to implement, add it to your website as soon as possible, right? There's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be adding that code snippet and letting Clarity start tracking and gathering data. Make sure that it's running in parallel with your GA4 so that you can start correlating the data from both tools. Secondly, I would focus on high traffic areas. So prioritize the pages on your website that are driving the most traffic or the pages that are most critical to your conversion goals. Uh, a lot of times these are the local landing pages as we talked about, but this will provide you the most immediate insight and opportunity for improvement. Thirdly, I would set up regular review meetings with your team to, uh, take a look and see what clarity is showing us or revealing. So in less than 30 minutes a week, I think you could get some significant insights and ability to identify issues really quickly and nip them in the bud before they become a bigger problem. Fourthly, I would use Clarity as a cross departmental tool. So don't let Clarity sit within your marketing team and your marketing team alone. I would definitely involve your user experience designers, your web developers, and even your customer service teams. Uh, because you're going to get a lot of insight that pertains to these departments as well. And that is very relevant for these departments. So take a holistic approach and make sure that all aspects of the user journey are optimized using Clarity. And then finally I would celebrate quick wins because Clarity is going to uncover a bunch of things which you may not have found had you not dived into it, right? So as you implement these changes and improvements, share the wins with your entire organization and celebrate the quick wins so that you can build momentum and encourage. Some further data driven decision making. All right. Well, that's it for today. Thanks for joining me on this deep dive into leveraging Microsoft Clarity alongside GA4. I hope you found these insights valuable and that you're now inspired to integrate these tools into your marketing strategy. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, share it with your colleagues and leave a review. Your feedback helps me bring you more real and relevant discussions on franchise business and marketing. Until next time, this is Vera Shafik signing off, keep innovating, keep optimizing and make data work for you.