Microsoft Clarity and why your website needs it
November 3, 2025
As a Toronto web design agency, we don’t just strive to build beautiful websites; we aim to develop smart solutions that add benefit to your business. A modern and functional website is just part of a website redesign, while understanding how your audience is using your website can help you improve the user experience and support decisions that will drive business growth. One powerful way this can be achieved is with Microsoft Clarity, a free analytics tool that helps you visualize how visitors are engaging with your website.
Session Recordings
At Simplistics Web Design Inc., it’s our goal to get our client’s users to their destination page in as few clicks as possible. Users won’t just end up on the destination page that meets their needs and will go through a journey to get there. For example, your destination page may be a Request a Quote page, but your users will likely want to see your portfolio first or read your reviews before contacting you for a quote and providing their information.
With session recordings, you can view the full user journey and identify friction points. Clarity allows you to replay how users navigate your website, providing valuable insights into their engagement and behavior.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps show you where users are focusing their attention. This can help identify if they are ignoring key information or not clicking on your call to actions. Clarity also identifies behaviors like rage clicks, which occur when your users repeatedly click on something that doesn’t work. Having this information can improve your website’s user experience and increase user satisfaction.
Privacy and GDPR Compliant
Being able to view users as they navigate your website may seem like a privacy concern, but Clarity is designed to mask sensitive data and complies with major privacy laws. Recordings will blur form input data, so it will never record user information or credit card details. You can only identify users by the IP address.
Microsoft Clarity vs. Google Analytics
Unlike Google Analytics, which provides a vast and sometimes overwhelming amount of data to sort through, Microsoft Clarity lets you see exactly how users are interacting with your website. You can visualize the user’s mouse as it navigates and clicks across every page on your website.
Google provides information like traffic sources, bounce rates, and conversions, where Microsoft Clarity focuses more on user behavior and how users experience your website.
Clarity doesn’t replace Google Analytics, so we recommend using both to get a complete picture of your website’s performance. Clarity even integrates with Google Analytics, allowing you to jump from a Google Analytics event directly into a Clarity session recording. Once connected, Clarity pulls in the following GA4 data to enrich its dashboard:
Audience Overview
- Number of users and sessions
- New vs. returning visitors
- Engagement metrics (e.g., average session duration)
Acquisition Report
- Traffic sources (organic, paid, referral, direct)
- Campaign performance
- Medium and source breakdowns
Popular Pages
- Most visited URLs
- Page views and unique views
- Bounce rate per page
Sessions by Country/Region
- Geographic distribution of users
- Country-level engagement metrics
Sessions by Device
- Desktop vs. mobile vs. tablet usage
- Device-specific behaviour patterns
Get Microsoft Clarity
If Simplistics Web Design Inc. developed your website, you are already using Google Analytics. If Microsoft Clarity is something that sounds helpful to you, please reach out to your account manager and we will help you set it up so you have the full picture of how users use your website.