Knowing is half the battle. Having an inviting website that utilizes good design principles is fine. However, it doesn’t always result in conversions. When it comes to securing clients and growing your MSP business, hitting and hoping isn’t enough. You must find ways to gauge the performance of your website and marketing with empirical data.
As such, you need definitive answers to questions such as: “Which parts of the UI do visitors respond to the most?”, and “How long does it take for the average visitor to leave your site without converting?”. Microsoft Clarity can provide answers to these questions. You can gather analytics and use them to improve your website and marketing’s effectiveness. But what is Microsoft Clarity?
What is Microsoft Clarity?
Microsoft Clarity is a web-based tool that provides you with visual insights into the behavior of your website’s visitors. You can use it to ascertain which elements of your website get the most or least attention. You can then use these insights to improve the user experience.
Microsoft Clarity’s key features
Over the last few years, demand for UX designers has steadily increased. Both LinkedIn and Glassdoor ranked UX design in their top 50 in-demand jobs of 2022. Careerfoundry ranks it 4th on its top 10 most in-demand design jobs.
Microsoft Clarity should be part of every UX designer’s arsenal. However, many start-ups and small businesses may not have the funds or resources to hire a dedicated UX designer. Fortunately, Microsoft Clarity is easy enough to use that it may offset the need for a UX designer, at least temporarily.
Clarity’s focus is evaluating your site visitors’ user experiences and providing results in various accessible and easy-to-understand formats. To carry this out, it features:
Session recordings
Session recordings allow you to capture high-definition anonymized videos of visitors’ interactions with your website. This allows you to see how your website works in the real world. You can identify elements that may put off or frustrate users. It also enables you to identify bugs.
Clarity also offers live recordings. You can track the number of visitors currently using your website and view their interactions in real-time.
Heatmapping
You can also create sophisticated heatmaps using Microsoft Clarity. These heatmaps highlight which elements or areas of your website garner the most attention. Microsoft Clarity gives you access to three types:
- Click heatmaps: Displays elements with the highest engagement.
- Scroll heatmaps: Reveals how far visitors have scrolled through your pages.
- Area heatmaps: Allows you to see the total number of clicks of a specific area/element.
The feature also enables you to view minute details of each element’s engagement. Additionally, you can also create side-by-side heatmap comparisons. This allows you to compare the engagement with two chronologically different versions of the same webpage. You can then compare if any elements or features you’ve added make a difference in how users engage with your website.
Insights dashboard
Microsoft Clarity’s dashboard displays engagement and webpage insights through a host of statistics and visual tools. Not only can you see data related to how visitors use your website, but you can also locate and isolate bugs such as dead links.
You can also check which pages result in quick backs or inspire doomscrolling. Just because a visitor or potential customer spends time on your website, does not necessarily mean they’re engaged. Features like these help you differentiate between active and passive engagement.
External tool integrations
You can extend Microsoft Clarity’s capabilities by integrating well-known external tools. These can be analytics and website user experiences tools such as Google Analytics, Optimizely Web, Webflow, Bubble, Elevar and WordPress, just to name a few. You don’t have to replace your entire software stack with Clarity. Instead, you can enhance their capabilities with Clarity’s features (and vice versa).
The benefits of Microsoft Clarity
Why use Clarity? Why not stick to more established products such as Google or Adobe Analytics? Here are a few benefits of Microsoft Clarity that both managed service providers (MSPs) and their clients might be interested in:
1. It’s open source and free
According to Microsoft, Clarity will be free forever. It’s an affordable tool for individuals, small businesses and start-ups. There’s no limit to how many websites you can use with Clarity. You can also find a bulk of Clarity’s libraries and source code in Microsoft’s official GitHub repository. This allows you to integrate many of Clarity’s features and capabilities into your in-house built applications. Even without these features, Clarity is highly customizable and offers users a simple and intuitive interface.
2. It’s GDPR and CCPA compliant
Infringing on the privacy of visitors when tracking their interactions can result in crippling penalties and fines. As such, most people would be concerned about the privacy-related implications of using a tool like Microsoft Clarity.
You have nothing to worry about in this regard. Microsoft Clarity was built with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in mind and is compliant with both. This is critical because the penalties for failure to comply with the GDPR or CCPA are severe: the CCPA will charge as much as $2,500 for unintentional violations, while GDPR penalties amount to 4% of turnover or twenty million euros, whichever is greater.
3. It utilizes machine learning insights
Microsoft has set out to position itself as a leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Most notably, they’ve introduced products such as Power Automate and Azure Machine Learning. Clarity’s dashboard analytics are aggregated and reinforced with machine learning which can extract more meaningful insights from how visitors interact with your website.
Why should your MSP use Microsoft Clarity?
So how do Microsoft Clarity’s features and perks benefit your MSP? Whether you’re at the beginning stages of your journey or running a well-established MSP, you can always improve. Microsoft Clarity can help you gauge the effectiveness of your website design and customer experience.
However, this isn’t the only way you can take advantage of Microsoft Clarity’s features. Again, because it’s partially open source, you embed many of its features into your own products and services. You can use it to generate client reports that you can potentially charge for.
Alternatively, you can introduce Microsoft Clarity to your clients and offer training to show them how to integrate its services into their products. Needless to say, the options and applications for MSPs to generate revenue are broad!
Stay up to date on Microsoft products and services that help your MSP
Again, Clarity is just one example of how Microsoft is helping MSPs and their clients. There’s an entire ecosystem of services and tools that business owners can take advantage of. As an award-winning Microsoft partner, Sherweb can help you stay updated on the latest products, allowing you to maintain your business’s competitive edge.
Check out our partner guide for more information about how Sherweb can help your business grow, or join our partner program today.
