Notes on installing Microsoft Clarity

I added Microsoft Clarity to one of my projects this week. It took about ten minutes to install, and within an hour I had learned more about how people actually use the site than Google Analytics had told me in months.

What it actually does

Clarity is Microsoft's behavior analytics tool. You paste a script tag in your site's head and it starts recording two things. Heatmaps that show where people click and how far they scroll, and full session recordings you can play back like a screen capture of a real visit. That kind of thing used to be a paid feature in tools like Hotjar or FullStory.

There is no session cap on the free plan, because there is no paid plan. Microsoft is presumably using the aggregate data to improve their own products, and they say so in the privacy policy. The recordings of your own visitors stay in your project.

What I saw in the first hour

A few things jumped out almost immediately:

• Visitors rage-clicking on a piece of text I had styled to look button-ish but never wired up as a link
• A section of the homepage that almost nobody scrolled past, which I had assumed was central enough that everyone would see it
• One person tabbing through the page with the keyboard, which made me realize I had never tested focus order on most of the site

None of that would have shown up in Google Analytics. GA gives me visitor counts and conversion goals. It cannot show me a user spending the better part of a minute trying to click something that is not a button.

A few practical notes

If you decide to install it:

• It is lazy-loaded, so it does not hurt your PageSpeed scores
• The Copilot summary feature is genuinely useful. Instead of playing back a six-minute recording, you get a paragraph describing what the user did. Saves time when you have more sessions than hours in the day.
• You still need to mention session recording in your privacy policy, even with the GDPR-friendly defaults
• Dropping the snippet in via Google Tag Manager is cleaner than editing the head template directly, if you already have GTM set up

One script tag, zero dollars. Install it on whatever you ship next.