Recently Microsoft has announced Clarity Analytics, a free web analytics tool with which to learn about the behavior of your users on your pages.
As everything has to be proven, today we are going to see how to integrate Microsoft Clarity Analytics into WordPress and how to take advantage of its potential to improve the traffic and SEO of our pages.
What Microsoft Clarity Analytics is and what it is not
Starting with what it is not, this new Microsoft tool is not a substitute for Google Analytics, nor for the Google Search Console, nor for Bing’s webmaster tools.
What Microsoft Clarity does do is help you see how users click, how and where they scroll, and how they interact with your pages.
Perhaps the most relevant feature is data visualization, where you can see the clicks made, heatmap reports, even recordings of your users’ sessions, to see how they navigate your pages.
How to install Microsoft Clarity Analytics in WordPress
So the process is the usual one to add tracking codes, but let’s go step by step…
Registration in Microsoft Clarity Analytics
The first thing is to sign up for the service from this page.
Click on the “Get Started” button and you will be asked which account you want to activate the service with (Microsoft, Facebook, Google).
After your choice you will have to grant the typical permissions.
And you have already activated Microsoft Clarity Analytics.
Project activation
Once on the Microsoft Clarity Analytics page the first thing to do is to create a project, so choose a name, the URL of the website you want to analyze and a category (blog, ecommerce, etc.)
Once this is done, you will be shown the integration methods, and you can choose from 3:
- Installation of the code in third party platforms (including WooCommerce)
- Manual installation of the tracking code
- Integration with Google Analytics
Yes, integration with Google Analytics. So if you already have Google Analytics code in your web you just have to accept the usual permissions and Microsoft Clarity Analytics is already integrated in your WordPress.
Otherwise, despite what it says in the first option, you have to copy and paste the tracking code manually.
Insert the tracking code
Unless you have connected your Microsoft Clarity Analytics account with Google Analytics, in the other two methods the procedure is the same: copy and paste the tracking code.
In the header of the active theme
If you have no other option, open the header.php file of the active theme and, before the closing tag add the tracking code and save the changes.
A typical way to do this is from the built-in WordPress theme editor.
In the theme integration settings … if you have them
If you use themes like Divi, which offer a section in their options to integrate code easily use the insertion part in the header.
Simply enable the header code integration option and paste your Microsoft Clarity Analytics insert code there.
With a plugin
There is already an official Microsoft Clarity Analytics plugin, which you only have to install, activate, and on its Clarity section in the Settings of your WordPress admin bar write down the project ID associated with your website, previously created as we have seen in the previous steps.
In your cookies and RGPD plugin settings
However, the best option is for you to insert the code through your RGPD plugin settings.
This way the code will only be activated after the user’s consent, which is legally admitted by the EU privacy regulations.
With respect to privacy, in addition to inserting the tracking code correctly, with the consent of the users, you must also add to your privacy page information regarding this service, telling users what is analyzed, how, for how long and where information that you can review on the Microsoft Clarity Terms of Use page.
And that’s it, now you just have to wait for Microsoft Clarity Analytics to collect data from your visits for a few hours, or days, to start showing you relevant data on how your visitors use your pages.
Microsoft Clarity Analytics data analysis
Once the service collects data from our visitors we will have several screens from which to view very valuable information to learn how our users use our website.
Desktop
The summary of our traffic and how it interacts. The data, which we can filter by time periods, shows:
- Sessions
- Pages per session
- Depth of scroll
- Length of stay
- Dead clicks (in places where there is nothing to click on)
- Quick clicks (same but in one area)
- Excessive scrolling
- Quick returns: When the user returns immediately to the previous page
- Most popular pages
- References: Traffic Sources
- Traffic analysis by:
- Devices
- Countries
- Operating Systems
- Browsers
- JavaScript errors
It is not Google Analytics but it is a very complete overview, including some interesting additional elements, such as scrolling analysis, or dead clicks.
Recordings
This is perhaps the most interesting part because you can see recordings of how users navigate your website, and you’ll surely be surprised where they stop, what they click on, where they make mistakes because they think they can click on something. Very interesting, to learn and take action, of course.
Simply choose a recording on the left and it runs on the main screen.
Heat Maps
You can also learn a lot about the behavior of your users through heatmaps, as they will visually show you the hot and cold areas of display, navigation and clicks on your pages.
From this type of graphics it is especially interesting to learn from mistakes, from those parts of your website that attract more attention and clicks than you would like, in the end, from your design and usability mistakes.
Currently it only makes heatmaps of clicks but it will soon incorporate scrolls as well.
You have to try it!
If you are going to spend time analyzing how your visitors navigate your website you should try Microsoft Clarity Analytics, as it incorporates utilities that in other similar services are paid.
Besides, you can add as many projects (websites) as you want, each one will have its own tracking and statistics code.
You can learn a lot about the real usability of your website thanks to Microsoft Clarity Analytics, because you will see real user interactions, who never use the website like you, who already knows where everything is.
Well, at least try it, and if you are really going to spend some time learning to improve your website, it is a service that will provide you with very valuable and useful information.
Read this post in Spanish: Microsoft Clarity Analytics en WordPress – Cómo instalarlo y por qué deberías probarlo
