On August 25, at 6:30 pm SFIMA members were treated to a personal demonstration of Clarity, the latest and greatest behavioral insights tool from Microsoft. We were joined by Sharon Peng, a Microsoft program manager, and Clarity expert.
Here’s a recap of what we learned about Microsoft Clarity.
What is Behavioral Analytics?
We all know that data tends to be in 2 buckets.
- Quantitative = What you can count and measure. Traffic, sessions, users. This is the ‘what’ is happening on the website.
- Qualitative = Observable and descriptive data. This is the ‘why’ is this happening on the website.
Both are necessary, but quantitative data can be unhelpful or even downright misleading if not backed up by qualitative data.
As Sharon points out, “If you have no idea what you’re measuring, then you’re not going to get the correct solution.”
For example, you may notice your bounce rate increase or an increase in abandoned carts on your website, and you’re not sure why. You can make assumptions and change the website, but without real behavioral insights, you’re making decisions in the dark.
Ultimately, you can install all the tracking you want on the site, but how can you use that data to understand what users really want?
That’s where qualitative data comes in. And that’s what Microsoft Clarity is designed to do, to help digital marketers and business owners understand users.
Decision Making
As Sharon mentioned at her SFIMA event, data matters, especially when it comes to making trade-off decisions. Most digital marketers are more than aware of the crux of decision-making online. There’s always a trade-off.
For example, speeding up a website might mean losing some design features. Adding in a fantastic call-to-action, could push vital information below the fold. And so on.
Without real qualitative data, the decisions are often left to company executives or higher-ups who make decisions based on a whim. And these trade-off decisions could be causing more problems than they are solving.
Making these trade-off decisions is much easier when you have viable user data. It really is that simple.
Qualitative Data Debugs Conversions
As Sharon mentioned, digital marketers, business owners, and service providers are typically faced with these questions every day:
- “What can I do to drive more sales and conversions to my product or service?”
- “How can I make my PPC and social ads campaigns more effective?”
- “How do I make my product more appealing to customers?”
Sharon focused on a number of specific case studies in which real companies use behavioral data to better understand their users.
The results were staggering and some of the changes were somewhat simple.
This includes but is not limited to:
- Simplifying sign up flow.
- Splitting up the sales funnel into easy-to-digest pieces.
- Clarifying user input areas.
- Shortening product information pages, and changing content to make it more concise.
- Changing static content, making it clickable, and defining the user journey more clearly.
Even slight changes like these can make a massive difference in conversions, and in some examples, Sharon mentioned Clarity users increasing conversions by as much as 86% based on these insights and changes.
Access
It’s worth noting from the start that Clarity is a free tool.
To install Clarity, you can follow the same process that you’ve used to install other tracking codes like Google Analytics.
- Sign up for Microsoft Clarity here.
- Copy the script and add it to your website header.
- Or, use Google tag manager to add in the script.
You should begin to see data within 2 hours.
If you want to see a more detailed brief on installing Microsoft Clarity, visit the install support page here.
