How to Enhance Your Website with Heatmaps Using Microsoft Clarity and Google Analytics

Introduction

Understanding how users interact with your website is crucial for optimizing user experience and driving conversions, and heatmaps are an invaluable tool for this purpose. Heatmaps visually represent user behavior by highlighting areas of high engagement, such as clicks and scrolls, on your webpage. Microsoft Clarity offers a robust, free heatmap tracking solution that easily integrates with Google Analytics, providing a seamless and comprehensive view of user interactions. In this article, we’ll show you how to enable heatmap tracking using Microsoft Clarity alongside Google Analytics.

Prerequisites

Before you proceed with this article, please ensure you have the following:

  1. A website that is tagged with Google Tag Manager and successfully sends data to the appropriate Google Analytics property.

If you don’t have a website yet, you can easily create one by following my guide here. Additionally, if you haven’t set up Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager, you can follow this setup guide.

Setting up Microsoft Clarity with Google Analytics

Creating your first project

First, visit Microsoft Clarity and sign up. Confirm your email and accept the Terms of Use. You’ll then be directed to create your first project. Choose the type of project (e.g., website or mobile), provide the name and URL, and select the industry.

Connecting to GTM

Next, select your installation method. Since we assume you already use GTM for Google Analytics tagging, choose “Install with Google Tag Manager” and click “Start Setup.” On the following screen, click “Connect Now.” Accept the terms and conditions for using Clarity with GTM. Select the appropriate GTM account and container, then click “Create and publish.”

This will create a new tag for Microsoft Clarity in your GTM account and publish any staging changes, so keep this in mind.

Connecting to Google Analytics

After setting up GTM, connect to Google Analytics. Find the ‘Google Analytics Integration’ section on the’ Setup’ page and click ‘Get Started.’ Select the appropriate site to connect and click “Save.” Grant Microsoft Clarity the necessary permissions on Google Analytics.

Before Viewing Data

You should now see checkmarks next to ‘Google Analytics integration’ and ‘Google Tag Manager integration.’ Wait for about 2 hours before data starts appearing. For specific use cases involving Google Analytics, you can refer to this page. This resource provides detailed examples and insights on leveraging the integration for maximum benefit.

Visit the official Microsoft Clarity documentation for comprehensive documentation on Microsoft Clarity, including advanced features and troubleshooting. Here, you’ll find everything you need to fully utilize Clarity’s capabilities and enhance your website’s performance.

I can also recommend using this video (on 2x speed) as a nice introduction to what you can do with Microsoft Clarity.

Conclusion

Now, you can view heatmaps of user interactions on your website, providing valuable insights into how users engage with your content. This data is essential for optimizing user experience and improving your website’s performance. If you found this guide helpful, please share it with others so they can also benefit from it.

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