Clarity provides free heatmaps and session recordings to improve your website.
When I created my first website in 1997, it was incredibly difficult just to provision a hosting account and connect a domain name to it. When I created my first e-commerce site in 2001, shopping cart solutions cost thousands of dollars or required coding skills to put to use. An analytics tool that you can get for free today cost hundreds of dollars a month.
We’ve come a long way in the past two decades. Now the average jane or joe and create an e-commerce store in a couple of hours for under $100.
Another tool that used to cost a lot of money and is now free is session tracking and heat maps. I recently installed Microsoft Clarity on my PodcastGuests.com site to look for user experience breakdowns. Microsoft launched the free tool in general availability in October last year.
Clarity creates heatmaps and click maps for your site and records user sessions. This can help you find places on your website where people expect something to be a link, but it isn’t. It can also help you find navigation issues.
PodcastGuests.com paid members create an online profile using a fairly long form. Clarity allows me to watch user sessions as people complete this form to find issues with it. Watching user sessions has helped me develop tweaks to make the process smoother.
I became aware of Clarity after Squadhelp added the option of using Clarity on white label domain stores.
No matter what type of site you operate, it’s amazing to now have free tools like this.
Jagan says
Thank you for the info. The tool seems awesome. Will test it out.
Rob says
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but all these free things are not so free.
I suspect many have caught on at least in a small way to the obscene level of spying going on. Facebook for example is free, but it’s well know that YOU are the product and the data they collect on you is sold to many parties. Enjoy your targeted ads and junk email. Google is possibly the best example of spying, and yet many domainers happily put their spyware right into every website. Why do we participate in this massive crime?
I never have and never will contemplate putting google or microsoft etc spying into my websites. Sure, maybe there is some “benefit” that I might lose, but then we are giving up our privacy for only a relatively small benefit. It’s like giving up your freedom for only a small offer of a benefit or token freedom (which you have by default anyway). Insane. Stuff them all and help get rid of these insidious parasites.
Frank Drebin says
Relax, dude.