Microsoft Clarity Tutorial

Transcript: Microsoft Clarity Tutorial

This transcript of Microsoft Clarity Tutorial comes from the video's captions, lightly cleaned. Click a time and the set jumps to that moment.

Introduction to Microsoft Clarity, The free, enterprise-class website analytics tool

0:06 Hey everyone, welcome back to David Quaid SEO TV and tonight I want to talk about Microsoft Clarity, one of the most underrated and powerful tools out there for digital marketers, SEO, PPC managers, UX designers, web builders, web maintenance, website owners,
[clears throat]
Anyone who does anything with a website and marketing needs this tool. It is an enterprise class tool that is completely free of charge no matter how many users you have. It integrates with all of the

Clarity's Google integrations and GDPR compliance

0:34 Google products, Google Search Console, Google Ads, Google Tag Manager. It's click button install. It's in setup in a couple of minutes and start recording. It's California and GDPR compliant. It is full of a host of features and Microsoft are adding even more and Microsoft are even including their AI reports like their share of authority report based on the Bing AI performance tab. Which now also seems to include ChatGPT data. And they're now including

The unique features: heat maps, prompt tracking, and AI reports

1:06 Prompt tracking. So a tool like this like Hotjar something like that plus the prompt tracking could cost you hundreds of dollars per month. This tool, yes it's a heat map. A lot of people think that they know what it is and what it does and that it looks like an analytics tool. It's so much more than that. Whenever I show this to people it goes from like a should have to an absolute priority and must have next week. So

Setting up Clarity on your website and real-world data insights

1:30 I set this up on my own website and I just want to show you how powerful and rich this is and do this as fast as possible. Because this is the fourth time I've recorded this tonight. So in the last three days I've had 624 sessions including 39 bot sessions which are excluded. Now this will also connect to your CDN and Cloudflare so it can track AI bots for data. Average of 1.4 page per session. Most people come in for my blog, they read a blog post, they go. So, for

Using data on session count, pages per visit, and conversion analysis

2:01 People who think that Google counts like that you go and visit multiple pages and it rewards sites for that. Completely untrue. Remember people can come into a page and convert in a single page. People can also come back in multiple visits, right? So, somebody could read my blog post, remember me and come back. In fact, we can see that people have converted within three pages. And

Understanding bounce rates, return visits, and user behavior metrics

2:26 That's because people might go away and think about things or analytics could be broken. If analytics is that broken, you can imagine that it's broken for Google. Chrome isn't that universally deployed. Even on my site where I'm talking to a majority of Google fanboys, everyone in SEO, it's barely 70%. So, just because somebody can come back in a month from now and convert in a form without clicking more than one page cuz it could be a pop-up form, doesn't mean Google's going to penalize people for being hyper efficient. So, I think if you look at the data, high bounce rates and single page visits are the norm. So, average of 50 seconds on site with 4 and 1/2 minutes total time. Here's the users overview tab, number of live users, which is pretty cool, and then top users and where they're from, all users, and then users intent insights. So, rage clicks,

Heat maps insights: click areas, dead clicks, and scroll tracking

3:24 How many people you know, hammered the mouse button because they can't find something, dead clicks, they click on space that isn't clickable. It's amazing. A lot of heat maps, especially the one in Google Analytics, only shows you the clicks for HTML click points. But because there's no referral information from the home page or other pages, they can't show you where people click in dead space. But because this is a true screen recorder, it can. Excessive scrolling and then quick backs

Setting up smart events, funnels, and cross-device tracking

3:53 Where people click, see a page, doesn't even load, and they bounce back, which could also be the search engine, and that's bad for SEO. Here you can also set up flutter app. You can also set up smart events like tracking outbound clicks, contact us, submit form search. You can set up funnels, so if you have a multi-stage process, you can put that in here. Referrers, channels. Remember that channels were designed in the 1990s by the W3C consortium, and that was in a world

Browser, device, and referral data analysis - the modern landscape

4:24 Where people were in browsers and they went from page to page, from search engine to page, from LinkedIn to page. Now people are in apps, cross devices, the Google app, Safari browser, Chrome browser, and then the Reddit app, LinkedIn app, X app, all of those apps don't share header referral information. Here's your browser information. What devices people are coming in. How many pages, JavaScript errors, load performance, that kind of thing. Very, very cool. Let's take a look at a heat map. And just wait for this to load.

Visual heat map demonstration and interpreting user click patterns

5:03 So this is really cool and not a lot of heat map tools actually do a really great job at this, but this just shows that a lot of people are clicking here on the word based on my homepage. And in the text here just showing that they really want to hear more, I guess, maybe find out more about me, but also clicking in this space. And I don't think what people realize, and we'll see this in the recordings, that people mouse mice tend to lead where their eyes are looking on the screen. And then they also tend to like to click

Privacy features: masking sensitive data and mobile vs. desktop views

5:34 On icons and graphics. Oh, and this is actually the mask, so wherever numbers are, it masks it so that it protects people's privacy, just in case, for example, they're logged into their bank account or something like that, or their share account, and it shows information. What's also interesting is the number of people that go to my SEO FAQs, cuz obviously, like a lot of SEOs, I designed that for people to come in from Google, but it looks like visitors actually like to go there, too. So, that's a heat map. I don't find it

Setting up Clarity: connecting to Google Tag Manager, AI options, and CDN

6:04 That exciting, but it's something you can do by click or by area. So, you can break it up like this. You can also filter, and you can also see what it looks like on mobile and desktop, which is amazingly cool and powerful. Let's have a quick look at the settings. So, this is all you need to set up. Then you've got your team.

Managing smart events, recordings, and analyzing user sessions

6:32 You can connect it to Google Tag Manager. It's a two-click install and set up, and then also Google Analytics, whether you want to allow cookies, and then you've got your AI visibility options. And this is where you connect your CDN. Masking, where text and numbers are masked. Block IP address blocking, and you can also block your own IP address without having to look it up, so that saves a lot of time. It's very, very handy.

Deep dive into session recordings, filters, and user interaction playback

7:00 And then also, you can just set up Clarity using a script or set up Copilot, and I think they're also building a Copilot chat tool that you can deploy as a bot, kind of beating Google to the game. S- this is your smart events, where you can set up like events to track, and so on. And this is also very helpful for recordings. So, let's pop over to recordings and have a look here. You can sort by duration, time, clicks, like

How to analyze form submissions, user journey, and click behavior

7:30 Low to high, high to low, or number of pages high to low. And then look at this filter screen. Isn't this amazing? You can pick how many days you want to look back on, what kind of device, rage clicks, dead clicks, excessive scrolling, cursor movement, enter text, resized, did they have a high intent, low intent, did they click on text, did they enter text, where did they come from, performance score, LCP for, you know, see what it looked like when it wasn't performing quickly, this is a very robust extensive filter. And this is my favorite part. I love watching the recordings and so I'm going to explain how the recording window works. So, it'll tell you where they entered and where they exited. And this is your play controller, so your play button, rewind, fast forward. You can add notes. It also builds this really cool AI notation system automatically with timings and pages and

Using AI notations, notes, and recording controls

8:27 You can turn slang off if you need to prepare this for reporting for executives. And then you've got a skip activity button, which allows you to skip an activity. So, you can see here the user is clicking between these events and then there's a long pause while they read data. And you'll also be able to see the mouse lag and where they click. And it there's also an audio sound for that. And you can see the email address and telephone number are

Playback security: masking data and interpreting recordings

8:54 Masked out to be for security and privacy reasons. You might see a lot of broken images, but that's just the way the video player is built. Don't take it that's what the user actually saw. It's not an actual recording of the user screen. What it does is it records the mouse data and then plays that back over your website. So, it's very, very clever. And then you can sort of bounce along. You can also choose the play speed and speed it up and then slow it down

Filtering recordings by activity types and performance metrics

9:21 When you find something that's super interesting and you just want to sort of slow it down and see it in slow motion. Sorry, that was terrible. I should really cut that out. I probably won't. And then you can go through and then you can also filter. So, for example, we want to filter if somebody entered data for example. So, we'll do enter text, apply. Also shout out to

Real-life example: monitoring user data entry and form interactions

9:48 Sushin on X. Thank you so much for coming over to my site and filling in a form to make sure I would have data to see somebody filling in data so I would have like a recording to playback. So, let me put in the last 4 days. So, I appreciate you doing that for listening to me and following me on X and then coming over to the site to fill in data. I appreciate it.

Understanding user navigation and form filling behavior

10:20 So, here's a visitor entering on my homepage. And then looking around. Oh, sorry. I think play next is play the next recording. So, let's just speed this up.

Navigating project settings, AI visibility, and Bing Webmaster Data

11:06 And jump to And here's somebody filling in the form, putting in their contact details and hitting send so that I could show you could actually see somebody filling in the form which means if you've got a more complicated form than I do, people are getting stuck, you can figure out exactly where they're getting stuck, how they're moving the mouse. Come on, isn't this brilliant? And then the new part, this is the part I got I keep getting stuck on when I making these recordings, but

Using Bing Webmasters tools for authority reports and domain insights

11:34 Let's go to my projects. Let's go back to primary position and let's go to the AI visibility. So, here's the citations report. So, this data is coming from Bing Webmaster Tools. You need to set up Bing Webmaster Tools. It's super easy. First of all, all you do is go to Bing Webmaster Tools, log in, and then add in a domain, and then import that data from GSC. You don't have to go through the rigmarole of verifying that you're an owner and all of that. It'll trust your Google

Competitor analysis, coverage opportunities, and Microsoft's ongoing updates

12:03 Search Console authentication and then import all the data and then show it to you. But this Share of Authority report only comes in Microsoft Clarity. You can get this without deploying it to your website. So, you don't have to worry about slowing down your website to get this. So, you'll get their topic overview about what kind of queries people are coming in, the actual grounding queries or the query fan out, the pages that are cited in that, and then you can select the lookback window. And then you've got bot activity, so you can if you're connected with your Cloudflare. I don't have a CDN. And then this is the new topic insights where you can build up to 10 reports per domain with 10 to 15 prompts. So, minimum of 10, maximum 15 prompts. And then it runs it in real time and it's free of charge. This is incredible. So, these are the domains that I'm competing with and I'm in all of the I rank number one in all of the citations.

Final thoughts: Clarity’s growing feature set and personal endorsement

13:03 Citation rate, which is the my domain share of all pages across the prompt set. The answer contribution. So, I'm in the result set, but how often I'm in the contributed results. My overall share of authority and the domains I'm competing with. And this is really funny because obviously I'm surveilling or putting my own name and I think my own name shows up as Yeah, there it is as one of the competing competitors for one of the citations. And then there's some more data here

Closing remarks: future plans, community interaction, and upcoming videos

13:30 That shows you top content opportunities covered by competing websites that I might want to add to my website. So, it's not massively detailed like say Peak or Profound, but it's pretty good if you if you're not sure if you need one of those tools, this is a pretty good place to start. So, I'm going to spend more time playing with this. I think Google Sorry, I think Microsoft's going to add more to it. I really like where they're going, and I've been a big fan of of Clarity for a number of years. This is making me an even bigger fan. I'm sitting up at like 10:00. I'm flying to Ireland tomorrow, and yet well, New York and Ireland making this video just cuz I wanted to get this out so you guys could have a look. So, anything you want to know about it, anything you want me to dive into, I would love to cover a GA4 as well in another video. Maybe I'll do that at the airport or in the lounge. But also, thank you so much to everyone who's supported me since I started my YouTube channel. I really appreciate everyone on X and LinkedIn and on YouTube. So, please drop me a comment. Please if you need any help, if you want me to cover something else or something in here, please don't be shy. I'm here to help. Thank you so much for watching.