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Microsoft Clarity: the free tool that shows you why visitors leave your website
Microsoft Clarity is the easiest way I’ve found for a small business owner to see how people actually use their website, no coding or web design background needed. I’ve been using Clarity for a couple of weeks, and it has already shown me fixes I would never have caught on my own.
Why your website’s performance matters
Nothing happens in a small business until a visitor hands over some information: a name, a phone number, an email. No sale, no booking, no conversation happens until that first step takes place.
If a button doesn’t work, a form misbehaves, or a page loads slowly, people leave before that step. Clarity shows you where that’s happening.
What Clarity is, and how it compares to Google Analytics
Microsoft Clarity is a free website analytics tool that has been around since 2020. It records how visitors move through your site and flags the moments where they get stuck.
You don’t need to be an analytics expert to use it. Google Analytics is powerful, but it’s far more complicated.
Clarity gives you much of the same traffic information Google Analytics does. The difference is that it also lets you watch what visitors did, which makes the “why” behind the numbers obvious.
Start with the dashboard insights
The middle column of the dashboard is where I look first. It flags four frustration signals:
| Signal | What it means |
|---|---|
| Dead clicks | A visitor clicks something expecting an action, like a photo to enlarge or a new page, and nothing happens. |
| Rage clicks | A visitor clicks or taps the same small area over and over. Something usually isn’t working. |
| Excessive scrolling | A visitor scrolls through a page more than expected, often hunting for something they can’t find. |
| Quick backs | A visitor lands on a page and immediately goes back. They didn’t find what they wanted. |
There’s no faster way to lose a potential client than a link that doesn’t work. We’ve all been that frustrated visitor. These signals are especially useful right after a redesign.
Scroll further down and Clarity shows where traffic came from. On my site, visitors arrived directly and from Upwork, Bing, Google and Thumbtack. You’ll also see channels (organic search, direct, referral), browsers, devices, operating systems, and your top, entry and exit pages.
The browser breakdown is more useful than it sounds. If a form only fails on one browser, this is where you’ll spot it.
Use user intent to pick which recordings to watch
The best part of Clarity is that you can watch recordings of real visits. The User Intent tab, at the top left, sorts sessions into low, medium and high intent, so you know which ones are worth your time.
Low intent visits last a few seconds. On my site these were 1–6 second visits where people left almost immediately. Not much to learn there.
Medium intent was 57% of my visitors. You don’t have to watch every recording: Clarity writes an AI summary, called session insights, for each one. A few that taught me something:
- A tablet visitor on Safari went straight to the contact page, tapped a dropdown four or five times, then left. That looked like rage clicking, so I tested the form on a tablet in Safari. It worked fine, but if it hadn’t, I’d never have known without Clarity.
- A visitor from Upwork stayed seven minutes. The summary showed them coming back to watch more work samples. That’s exactly what the site is for: letting people research you before they reach out.
- A mobile visitor stayed seven seconds, and the summary noted the page loaded quickly. Fast loading on mobile, tablet and desktop is one of the main things I check.
- A visitor from Thumbtack spent a long time on the healthcare videos page, clearly doing research.
High intent visits are the ones that convert. My one high-intent visitor went from the homepage to the contact page, filled out the form, and landed on the thank-you page. I never saw that lead. It most likely went to spam. Lesson: check your spam folder.
You can also favorite recordings to come back to later.
Turn dead clicks into fixes
Dead clicks are where Clarity paid off fastest for me. Click into a dead click and the recording jumps to the moment it happened, with the spot marked on the playback bar.
On my pricing page, visitors were clicking on the package descriptions, specifically the vertical reels included in a package. They wanted to see examples, and those items weren’t linked to anything.
The fix is simple: link each package item to a live example, so people can see exactly what they’d be paying for. I would never have guessed that without watching real visitors try it.
How to use Clarity, in three steps
- Check the insights first. Look at rage clicks, dead clicks, excessive scrolling and quick backs in the middle of the dashboard.
- Watch a few recordings and read the session insights. Use user intent to pick which ones matter.
- Act on what you find. A broken link, a form that won’t submit, or a missing example is usually a quick fix.
Even if someone else built your website, you should be able to see how it’s working. It makes a real difference in turning potential clients into clients.
Thanks for reading. If you have questions about Clarity, or anything else on your website, don’t hesitate to reach out.