How to Use Microsoft Clarity: A Powerful Analytics Alternative
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Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want to know how to navigate the ever-changing marketing jungle.

jungle. Today, I've got a great show for you. I'm going to be joined by Chris Mercer, and we're going to talk about a free, powerful analytics tool from Microsoft called Microsoft Clarity. If you roll your eyes back a little bit when you have to go inside of Google Analytics 4 to try to figure out information, you're going to see that it's a free, powerful analytics tool from Microsoft called Microsoft Clarity.

but you really wish you had a very powerful tool that layers in AI and does amazing things that will blow your mind and it's completely free than today's episode is for you. Trust me, there's some power here. Also, if you're new to the show and you are not yet following the show, what are you thinking? Follow us on whatever app you're using because we've got some incredible content coming your way. Let's transition now over to this week's interview with Chris Mercer.

helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, I am very excited to be joined by Chris Mercer. If you don't know who Chris is, you got to know Chris. He's a measurement marketing strategist.

and founder of MeasureU, with the letter U, an online community that helps marketers transform their marketing results through data mastery. He's co-host of the Profit School podcast. Mercer, welcome back to the show. How are you doing today? I am doing excellent, Mike. Thanks for having me, man. It's good to be back. It's super exciting to have you here. We're going to talk about something we've never talked about today. We're going to talk about Microsoft Clarity and how it can be a really powerful analytics alternative.

We're going to get into what it is in just a second, but I want to start with the why. Why should marketers pay attention to Microsoft Clarity? Because obviously,

Google Analytics is where we spend a lot of our time, but Microsoft Clarity might be new to a lot of people. Let's talk about what the benefits are or the unlock for marketers, and then we'll dig into it in more detail. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Microsoft Clarity is really Microsoft's answer to what Google did with Google Analytics. They didn't have their own analytics platform at all, so they had

created Microsoft Clarity for that. And the cool thing about that and why I think it sort of unlocks things for marketers is this was one of the few platforms, especially from an analytics platform's perspective, that is made for a marketer. Like it's made with marketers in mind. It uses marketers' language,

It uses a lot of pictures, not a lot of data tables. It is designed to get in, get answers, and then get back out so you can go get some things done and improve your marketing. One of my favorite platforms for sure. And that's the whole idea is that it unlocks the ability for a marketer to come in there, take a look kind of from like an over-the-shoulder perspective, very similar to tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg with the heat maps and scrum acts and screen recordings, all of that stuff. And it's completely free. So it's the budget is amazing. Wow.

when it comes to what Microsoft Clarity offers. Yeah, and we also use it regularly inside of Social Media Examiner. And I'm going to tell everybody who's listening, it's a game changer. It's an absolute game changer. As you know, Mercer, Google Analytics feels like flying an airplane, right? There's so many things in there. It was clearly designed by engineers and data geeks. And honestly, most of us can't even tap the potential of it because it's just so confusing. Where Microsoft Clarity comes in,

The key word there is clarity. They make it really easy for you to understand the kind of things that you need to use. And I've got people on my team and my marketing team that are not techie.

Not nearly as techie as I am, and they've fallen in love with this. Are you also finding that your customers and students and stuff are also find this to be a powerful tool? Absolutely. This is like a yes and for us. This is, I mean, we use it at MeasureU, of course, as well as Google Analytics and Tag Manager and Looker Studio and all the other fun stuff that you can do with measurement. But from a base sort of getting started perspective, this is one of the most

powerful platforms that you could get into. And it's one of the most easiest platforms to start using, again, because it's intuitive. The whole idea is an over-the-shoulder view. So if you could virtually imagine as a marketer, you're coming over to your customers and you can see how they're using the site online,

Are they interacting with the buttons? Are they looking at the page? Are they visiting multiple blog pages or not? All of that stuff you can find in Google Analytics. But to your point, you're scrolling through a lot of numbers, a lot of data tables, and you're trying to figure out what they mean by all these different events. And if you didn't measure for a specific behavior, it's probably not there. You can't see it in Google Analytics. That behavior was never recorded, so it was never...

Never there. It's never there. But in clarity, it's kind of like everything's always on all the time. It's constantly recording. And because it's picture based, you literally can see over the shoulder of your users and you can see now it's all privatized, right? It's all anonymized. You're not seeing, you know, email addresses and all that stuff. They anonymize all that.

But the beauty of it is being able to virtually look over the shoulder of your customers as they're actually using the site. So it's not just them saying, oh, here's how I would use your site or here's my opinion of your site. It's how they're actually using it. And there's nothing better than seeing the actual behaviors left behind. Funny enough, a friend of mine who works for a big, big business says that they use Clarity at the enterprise level, right? Which makes a lot of sense because Microsoft, when you think of Microsoft,

at least in the marketing world, you think of really, really big business, right? And I would imagine this is, I don't know if the enterprise version has more functions and features. My guess is it probably does. But what I love about this is that smaller businesses, which are the primary people who are in my audience,

can use this sucker for free. So why don't we kind of define the basic out of the box functions it can do, and then we can get into like a side by side with Google Analytics. Like what are the basic things that it can do? You've kind of hinted at some of them. Yeah, it's like I said, it's very similar to tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg, if you're familiar with those, anybody that's ever used those. People that are familiar with heat maps or scroll maps,

And essentially all those are, for those that aren't familiar, is when the page loads up, imagine it sort of just takes a picture of the page and then more people that see it, if a lot of people see the top of the page, it's kind of like red hot. It's got a lot of eyeballs and it would be kind of like an orangey color. And toward the bottom of a page, maybe it kind of goes to a blue color because it's colder. Not as many eyeballs are seeing that part of the page. That's what a heat map is. It kind of shows you where people are actually paying attention on the site, on the page itself. So the heat maps and scroll maps will kind of show you that.

There's also screen recordings. And this is exactly what it sounds like, where it'll automatically show you can pick a page. Maybe it's your offer page. Maybe it's your cart page. If you're trying to figure out how to improve cart conversions, where you can literally see people using those pages, typing things in, you might be able to see some frustrating behaviors if they're trying to figure out how to get a widget to work or something like that.

And there was nothing better than being able to see that. And we can obviously get into this a little later. One of the best parts about Clarity, and this is where I think it meets a lot of these original platforms, by the way, are paid tools. Clarity's free, again, as we mentioned before. But the beauty of Clarity is it's because it's Microsoft,

and Microsoft has a sizable investment with ChatGPT, they've kind of built this with AI integrated. So you have this ability to pull up a bunch of screen recordings and instead of watching screen recordings, which is what most people think about, they're like, who's got time to watch a hundred different screen recordings? Nobody, right? But,

you can take those screen recordings, you can give them to Microsoft Clarity or it has them. It basically gives them the chat GPT and says, hey, can you take this segment, pull the top 10 and just basically summarize what's going on? Like, give me the headlines as to what needs to happen here. And it'll automatically do that for you. It'll also do that with heat maps. And that's what's an amazing tool because it's

picture-based, right? What they call qualitative data, but it's picture-based. So you're seeing your actual pages. You're seeing how people are actually integrating with them or using them, the different behaviors they're doing with them. And you're getting this AI analysis that basically says, hey, here's generally speaking, what we're seeing is trends and patterns and some suggestions that you might do to move things forward a little bit if you're looking for some ideas. Completely free. It's such a powerful platform.

Another really cool feature of it is it's real-time data. This is something we should talk about because Google tends to be delayed by 24 hours, right? Talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Google Analytics 4, most people don't realize this is going to be, it's a little different Microsoft Clarity because of how it's,

It's designed to sort of capture pictures and screen recordings so you can do those in real time. Whereas Google Analytics, they're trying to do a lot of attribution and the marketing ad spend. It does a lot more, to be fair, to Google Analytics. That's why it is a lot more robust, but it's a lot more geeky, as you mentioned before. It's made by engineers for engineers at the end of the day. Right.

But the biggest difference with Google Analytics 4, because it does all this extra stuff, it has a lot of modeling and machine learning it needs to do. So it has to think about the data and double check the data and triple check the trends and all the other stuff. That takes processing time. That's why that 24 hour delay is there. And it can take up to seven days on the longer end of it to actually model what the attributions really are. So your attributions will change over the first few or four or five days too with Google Analytics, depending upon how much traffic you have.

With Microsoft Analytics, it doesn't need that because it's not designed for answering those types of questions. It's literally designed to show you the behaviors that are happening on the pages. Are they going through your sites? Are they going through your funnels? Are they, and again, speaking from a marketer's perspective, are they, they have a cool thing called rage clicks. It's one of my favorite things they came up with.

Kind of like Google Analytics has a bounce rate. They kind of made up this metric called bounce rate. Well, what's a rage click with Microsoft Clarity? A rage click is when they're clicking on something and the expected behavior didn't happen, so they clicked again, right? They're clicking quickly. They're trying to get something to happen. So maybe it was a photo that looked like a button, or maybe it was a button that just wasn't linked right. You would be able to see those things. It'll automatically segment those.

And we can get into this a little bit later, but it also does things like behavioral interpretation. Like what's their intention? Were they low intention? Were they medium intention? Were they high intention engagement? And you can build segments of all these audiences. Show me a high intention audience of somebody who's a really serious reader when it comes to our blog. And it'll build a segment of that and then give you all the screen recordings and you can have it analyzed by ChatGPT and it gives this nice little story of what's working, what's not, some things you might want to take a look at.

to look at. And you can do this within minutes. And that's the beauty of it. And it's so easy to set up. We haven't talked much about that, but very, very easy to get this thing on your site. Yeah. Go ahead and tell us about the setup. Absolutely. So when you create a free account, so you just go to clarity.microsoft.com. So clarity.microsoft.com will take you there. You'll sign in. You don't have to have a Microsoft account. We use our own Google accounts to keep it all linked together. So you could use your Google account to sign in. And all you're going to do is you're going to create this little space for your site.

And we kind of do it for each main brand that we have. We'll use it for different clients. So we'll create a Microsoft setup, a Clarity setup. It'll give you a piece of code just like every other software on the planet does, just like Google Analytics does. It just gives you the script and then you take that script and if you're using WordPress or whatever you're using, just put it on all your pages. That's all you need to really do. It doesn't require a ton of setup.

which also kind of separates it out a lot from Google Analytics 4, which does require setup. That's sort of a huge mistake with Google Analytics 4. It's just as easy to put code on Google Analytics 4 and get it up and running, but you really have to do a bunch of setup to teach that platform what you're trying to look for because it's so robust. Whereas Microsoft is really,

really focus on this pictorial stuff, right? The heat maps and the scroll maps and screen recordings and that sort of stuff. So when you put the code on the page, it sort of already is built in with what it needs to do. So you can get up and running a whole lot faster. And to your point, it's real time. So I would typically say, if you're going to start with this, you could put the script on your pages in the morning and by the afternoon, you might see some stuff that you actually start taking some action on. Again, depending how much traffic everybody has. Yeah. And the way we do it

is we have a separate instance, if you will, for each of our products, right? So we've got a whole bunch of different products and the tags or the code, for lack of better words, is only firing on those product pages. We just find that's a little easier and then we can invite team members in and all that kind of fun stuff, if I'm not mistaken. I'm pretty certain that's how it works. Okay, let me just summarize what we've got so far. First of all, it's really easy to set up. Secondly, we talked about screen recordings and heat maps and scroll depth. A couple of things that it's got

out of the box includes smart events, funnels, and these basic reports and insights. Do you want to just kind of introduce what those things are? Yeah. So some of this stuff is newer, which is kind of nice because it shows that the platform is constantly evolving. Because believe it or not, this platform is like the best kept secret. And maybe that's not a great thing from Microsoft's perspective. But this platform has been around for going on

five years, something like that. It's been around for a long while. And more recently over the last couple of years, it's really started evolving with what it can do and what they're allowing it to do.

A couple of those things. One is the smart events feature, which essentially what it's doing is it's listening for behaviors and then you can tell it, you know, it'll listen for all these behaviors and you can tell it like, oh, that behavior is something that I want. So for example, let's say you have a blog, some content blog and you've got a bunch of blogs and at the bottom they have a button that says continue reading, right? A link that just says continue reading.

Well, if your site has a bunch of those, Microsoft Clarity is going to recognize that. And it goes, oh, it looks like a bunch of people are clicking on something and the words are continue reading. And so what it'll do is it'll actually record that as a potential smart event that it might want to tell you about that you might want to put in a certain segment. So it'll give you this list of stuff and says, hey, here's all the stuff I've collected. Would you like to see people who clicked on continue reading? And you're like, well,

Well, yes, I would. It's already there. Versus Google Analytics 4, which is, okay, now I have to go find somebody that has the click URL. You have to figure out how to engineer the whole thing. Absolutely. It's just there. Which again, is what I really like about it because they're not building this platform. And I don't mean this in a bad way at all. This is a really good way. They're not building this platform for a data analyst. Whereas GA4 is built for a data analyst as its end user. That's kind of what they wanted. Microsoft Clarity is built for the marketer.

I mean, they really went after the marketers. They use marketing language and marketing terms. So hence the smart events. They're just unique behaviors that it's recognized that are a pattern of behaviors that might be on your site that you might be interested in. And then to that end, then there's funnels. So then you can create a series of funnels even based on the smart events if you wanted. People that loaded a page or came from a certain traffic source and then went through this particular series of steps to complete this user journey.

right? Whatever it happens to be. And again, that's somewhat new as well, the idea of creating funnels back there. All of it pretty simple to set up. You don't need to have those set up before you can start effectively using the platform though. And I want to emphasize that. You can grow into some of that complexity. It's not that hard to set them up, but you don't need to worry about it on day one. You can get in there, you can use the rage click stuff, it'll automatically do. So it automatically creates that segment. It automatically creates a segment of what they call the dead clicks, I believe they call it, where it

Something's clicking, but nothing's identical. 404 kind of thing, right? Where the link is working. Excessive scrolling where somebody's going up and down, potentially looking for something, right? So they see that. Quickbacks, one of my favorites. What do you think a quickback is? When they're going to one page and then they go back, right? So they were looking for a page and they went, wait a second, this didn't quite answer my question or maybe it caused an issue so they had to go back to the previous step. That's a quickback.

All of this stuff, you can literally say, it'll say, oh, you've got 12% of your traffic is Quickbacks. Would you like to watch those screen recordings and see what's going on? And I'm like, yes. And then I immediately go summarize the top 10 of those. And it says, oh, it looks like this page, this particular user journey, here's what's kind of happening. Now I can go back to the marketing team and say, hey, I think we have an issue we might need to optimize in this particular journey. And it's, again, within minutes, this happens very, very fast with Microsoft Clarity. Yeah.

The other thing that I love is this thing they have called user intent, I believe it's called, and it's high, medium, and low. Do I have this right? And this allows you to kind of, especially if you have a sales page, right? It allows you to essentially get a sense of whether or not, like if you're doing a split test, if there's really low user intent on one test and really high user intent on the other test, it's just another signal that

is a little harder to wrap your brains around because a lot of times when we do split tests, we just look at simple stuff like conversions. You know what I mean? And this just kind of might tell you, hey, time on site is, I'm guessing it's a combination of time spent on the page and actions. That's exactly right. It's behaviors. That's how you think about it. So low intent is somebody who came to the site but didn't really do a lot of activity.

if you want to think about it like that, right? It's the behaviors on the site. Medium intent is, okay, they started scrolling and they're clicking around on a few things. And then you've got those high intent, which is, okay, they're scrolling, they're spending time. This is where time's a lot longer. They're engaging. They're starting to maybe trigger some of those smart events. It's starting to recognize patterns. And that's how it knows. It's like they're spending there longer. To that end, this is, again, this is kudos to the Clarity team because I think they really, really nailed it. Whoever made this decision to go down this particular path. They have reader type.

So we can talk more about this as we get into, you know, how you can slice and dice the segments. But you can say, I want to see the readers. And again, I love this because of what they call them. They have one and done. That's one of the reader types is a one and done. Well, that's sessions where they only viewed it once and they left. Then they've got the casual ones where you saw maybe two or three blog posts in that session. And then you've got those serious readers where they saw multiple blog posts and they stayed around. They're really your serious readers. Wouldn't it be great to have

segments of people who the one are done versus the serious. Maybe see if they came from a certain traffic source. Maybe see which pages that the serious ones are really interacting with. Maybe we can remarket those pages to the ones that are the one and done to try to get them back on. Again, pretty quick with clarity. And they do a lot of that. They even have one for reading behavior.

where it'll measure just based on the activities that are happening on the site, it'll measure the different levels of reader, let you know if it's super engaged, if they abandon. So for example, we've all been familiar with this. And I think, and this is where, again, clarity, kudos to the team because they took it another level. They could have just done a regular heat map where it's like, oh, I saw the headline and I scrolled to the bottom of the page very quickly to see the price and then I left.

Right. Well, when that sort of stuff happens, that's kind of a scanning behavior, right? You spend like two seconds on the page. They saw the price they left. They're not really interested. So, but yet most of the tools will show sort of, oh yeah, everybody saw everything on the page, which is technically true because they scrolled all the way down. But behaviorally, the message didn't cross. They didn't read your copy. They didn't look at stuff. They didn't really consider the offer. So it's a little bit misleading. So with additional things like the reading behavior, they measure for, hey, they just saw the headline then left.

Like they know this happened and they're just caught abandoned, you know, which I love. Then they have engaged and then they got the ones. I think it's just those two, abandoned and then the engaged ones. But this is the beauty of the tools is the stories. It speaks in the words that a marketer would normally use anyway, or at least words that are not that far away from what a normal marketer would use. Okay, so let's assume we've got some people who are already interested in using Clarity. Maybe they've already got an account.

And now they're in there and they're looking at kind of the standard reports that you see on the screen. And you've been calling these things segments, but they don't call them necessarily segments, I don't think.

explain kind of like what the user interface looks like when you're there and how you can kind of do basic filtering and segmenting and what that makes possible. Try to explain it to people so they can wrap their heads around it. I will do my best. Challenge accepted. So the way that clarity works, a segment is just a group of people. That's all it is. And they actually do, they do call them segments. Oh, do they? Okay. But there's a lot of pre-built segments that they don't point out as segments. So they will have one that says rage clicks, right?

but,

But that's a segment of people who have got the behavior of rage clicks, right? Well, and they'll show the percentage there, but you can hot link right on it. Yeah, you click to it and then it basically opens up that segment. And then it says, oh, okay, here's the segment of rage click people. What do you want to see now? The heat maps with them or the scroll maps with them or the screen recordings for them, which is kind of nice. But to your point where this really goes is, okay, what else can you do? Like, it's nice to know rage clicks are a thing. It's nice to know that I can go see the dead clicks or people that are doing the excessive scrolling or the quick backs.

But what other segments can you do? So what you do is in Microsoft Clarity, again, very simple. This is all in the sort of main dashboard. They call it the dashboard. It's what the homepage is called. Very easy to get through. Again, you're not looking at data tables, like something like Google Analytics, but you're looking at these sort of just widgets that are there. They could easily click on that naturally take you to a step that makes sense that they would. You know, it's just, it's so intuitive. But

But everybody's going to want to customize at a certain point. In the beginning, I don't think you have to. I think you get used to whatever the built-in ones are, explore it a little bit, get used to the interface. Pretty quickly, you're going to want to start asking questions like, well, hey, what's the difference between Instagram traffic and TikTok traffic?

And how can I separate those out? Well, that's not going to be a prebuilt segment because not everybody uses Facebook. Not everybody uses TikTok for their traffic. So they would never build that as prebuilt, but they have what they call filters. And so you set up these filters and you can say, well, I want to see filters. I want to filter by people that only came from TikTok or only came from Facebook or Instagram or whatever the thing is that you're looking for.

but you can filter by a ton of stuff. So yes, the traditional traffic sources. Yes, by landing pages that came into. Yes, by achieved a certain funnel or goal. Yes, by are they serious readers or do they just abandon headlines?

date ranges, device categories, right? Desktop or mobile, which by the way, because it's a picture-based platform, you can see, you can literally click on, okay, here's my screen recording. Well, let me go see the screen recordings for mobile and everything shows you the mobile version. So now you can, by default, see what your mobile site looks like. Because not a lot of people sometimes check that. They forget that.

Even to this day, I think so mobile friendly, but we're mobile first, but sometimes we skip that because we're used to working on desktops all the time and a lot of times. So you can start to see that stuff as well. And that's what's so nice. You can create a little filter and then save it. Now you've got a saved segment, right? Filtered by however you want to filter it by. And then you can do the heat maps and scroll maps and everything else on top of that. Do you ever feel like no one understands your marketing challenges? Do you wish you had people you could talk to about AI, content creation, or marketing strategy?

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Don't go it alone. Grab your tickets now at socialmediamarketingworld.info. So just to help people wrap their brains around this, because it might sound a little overwhelming, we at Social Media Examiner will do split tests. For example, for Social Media Marketing World, we might have two variations of the speaker page, right? One variation's got maybe the AI track at the top, and the other one has the marketing strategy at the top, hypothetically, right?

And what we'll do is we'll send an email to that page for a promotion, and then we'll know exactly when that email was sent. So what we can do is we can look at the traffic on that page from the moments before the email was sent and

And then for a few hours, why it was sent and what's really cool inside of clarity is you can go ahead, first of all, and set up these time ranges right down to the second. So I can say, for example, from 3 p.m. my time until 6 p.m. my time, I want to see the traffic on these two pages, right?

And then what you can do is you can click in on each of the pages. It creates kind of, for lack of better words, a little sub-segment and we put them side by side. And then we look at the data that's on the screen and we see things like one has a lot of people in the medium and high intent and one has a lot more people in the low intent. And then we look at like the scroll percentage seems to be higher on one versus the other. Right. And that just helps us kind of get a sense of,

For example, we found that right after an email is sent, the scroll depth is really low because we get a lot of people coming and immediately abandoning. So it can mess up our statistics, right? Because when you send a lot of traffic to a sales page, if they're not getting captured from the headline right away,

you know, they're going to bail instantly. And all of a sudden we thought we had a problem and we were able to isolate what traffic was like before we sent the email and after the email, it just kind of layered on an extra set of data that allowed us to kind of like take this along with the other tools we use like convert.com and layer a story on top of it, right? Which you've always talked about the data tells a story. So this is a story we cannot get through the other tools, which is

How is the user behavior? The other tools can tell us conversions.

But they don't tell us like these granular levels of user behavior, like user intent, scroll depth, that kind of stuff. So I don't know if you have any comments to add on that, but that's something we could not do with Google Analytics before. Yeah, exactly. And certainly even if you could, it would require a massive amount of pre-planning and thought and setup. And then you run all the traffic. Whereas Clarity is sort of run the traffic and then you go back and you can find the stuff.

To your point, when you were talking about a page loading up, because there's a lot of time this makes sense. People click on an email, they see the page, they go, well, that's a lot. I don't have time right now, but I'll come back to it later. And it stays open, but it's not the active page.

Right. What they call hidden tabs. Yeah. Cause your time on page looks high, but the scroll is horrible. Right? Right. So what clarity has, they actually have a segment where you can say, I just want to see how long when the pages were visible, or I want to see pages that were hidden. So it can literally see the difference there. And you can build segments and say, I just want to see people that had the page hidden for more than 10 minutes versus less than 10 minutes or something along those lines. So the, and this is where it's good. It gets to the point where do you need to know all this stuff to start with clarity? Absolutely.

Absolutely not. Do you need to know that there's a lot of things that Clarity can do for you? Absolutely. Because you can grow into this tool. And I think what they're doing right now with all the effort they're putting into these different features that they're coming out with and have been coming out with, they will consistently grow beyond what most marketers are going to need, which is great because they're kind of skating over the puck is and then you get to focus on step one and step two. And then you know that there's a step three that you can eventually do with the hidden tabs and all that fun stuff you can look for hidden pages.

But you can know that that's a thing now. You don't need to know how to do that. Step one is find out how to create your Clarity account, right? Step two is put it on all the pages. Step three is use those built-in segments. Start getting used to the heat maps and scroll maps and getting used to that. Use the AI features that are there and the summarization steps that are there. Then move into creating those custom segments when you sort of have the overall usage of the tool down. And then that will be a rabbit hole big enough to keep you busy for a while.

Because there was so much back there that you can tweak and filter by the different user behaviors that Clarity can see because it's capturing everything. That's the whole point. I would love to get your insights as a data guy on, first of all, heat maps and scroll depth data. Like, what's your professional opinion on how important or not important this should be when we're analyzing our marketing? I think they're important, but not...

not individually. So like not, not an Islander to themselves. They're a data point. But again, what we talked about before, like let's say somebody saw a headline scroll to the bottom of the page to see the price scrolled up and left in theory, that would be a hundred percent scroll because it technically is they scrolled. But that's not a 100% scroll.

that time element wasn't there. So when you're looking at tools like this, you always want to... I always call it triad in the data, but it's like, okay, what are the three different ways we can look at the data? So I need to have scroll 100%. That's great. But if they're just... Everybody's scrolling 100% in a second and they're gone, that's not actually what I want. So I want...

scroll, but with time, you know? So it's scroll, but they spend a minute on the page or five minutes on the page or whatever it is. With clarity, this is where you start getting into serious reader. I went scroll, but I need them to your point when you talked about this intention behaviors, I want medium intent so that they're going a little slower and looking through that page, right? So

As a tool, it is powerful to use it like that. And I think that is important. Then as with all things, you sort of build measurement muscle, right? And clarity is a fantastic tool. If you're a first timer, just get into this game. You don't have Google analytics. I would start with clarity to this day. I recommend that now.

for clients. If you have nothing at all, don't start with Google Analytics because it'll kick you in the teeth for a couple of weeks to get used to it. Whereas Clarity kind of wraps its arm around your shoulder and says, let's go. Let me show you how to do this. So it's a good platform to get started with. But eventually, as you get measurement muscle, you will start asking more nuanced questions that will eventually grow beyond what Clarity does. And that's where tools like Tag Manager and Google Analytics come in because they can measure more nuanced behaviors. But you're layering on top

at that time, right? So there is a yes and to it. It's not in and of itself going to be the only platform anyone's going to use all the time because it can't do everything, but it can do an awful lot of stuff and it's going to do 80% of the stuff that you need. And then you can use other platforms to get the more nuanced information. So the screen recording side of it, we've kind of scratched the surface of screen recordings a little bit. And I'm not going to go into

I think most marketers don't have time to look at screen recordings. And I would love you to share like which screen recordings we should look at and kind of what we should be looking for when we do choose to look at it. And then again, you can remind us about how that all that AI stuff plays into it. But there's going to be situations that maybe a lot of us don't realize that we can only discover through screen recordings. So

just talk to me about scenarios where you find screen recording valuable. Yeah, great question. So I think about screen recordings in terms of the user journeys, because this is the beauty of screen recordings. Yes, you're seeing one page, but you're seeing a recording of the entire session. So it's all the pages in the session. You're literally seeing them go from your offer page to the card, to the thank you page, whatever your user journey is, or moving through your blog, if that's what you're trying to get them to do to engage for that sort of content. So with screen recordings, again,

The trick is, as you mentioned, nobody's got a ton of time to watch them. And to be honest, it wouldn't be that useful anyway to watch one screen recording because it's just one person's experience at the site. And if you have thousands of people on the site, how do you know that one person's experience is actually worth it? Kind of a side note, but at a conference I was at, this was years ago, but there was an optimization session

person on there where they were talking about how they were using screen recording software. It was a different paid tool they were using at the time, which again, clarity, you don't have to pay for it. It's free. But they were using this tool and they were watching screen recording and they were playing it on for everybody. And they were showing how the person filled out the form all the way until they got to the part of the credit card number and then they abandoned. And so the team got together and they decided, okay, we have to adjust the card, blah, blah, blah. And all I kept thinking was, or that

person's kid came in and said, hey, where's dinner? Or they didn't have their credit card on them. Yeah, or they just went to go get it and they were like, oh, it's expired. I mean, there's a million things that could have happened, but they made decisions off that one screen recording because they just didn't realize how to use it. And again, that's not how you use screen recordings. You need to see a bunch of them.

So you have two options. With regular tools, you just watch them over and over and over and hope you figure out a pattern, which is possible. Or with Clarity, it's got this AI built in. So you will literally see all the screen recordings. And the coolest thing is it will show you screen recordings of people who are on the site live right now, which is nice. So if you have like a launch traffic, to your point, when you send the email, you can go to the screen recordings and watch them go through that journey. And I always think about it when you were saying like, what do we use them for, for the journey experience?

patterns. So for us, it would be the Academy Insiders user journey. Did they see the offer page? Then do they go to the cart? Then you go to the NECI page or through the upsells, whatever the thing was, or the accelerator or join the community. But these are user journeys. These are core user journeys that we need from our brand perspective, users to go through. And I want to see those so I can set up. And this goes back to the segments we talked about. I would create a little filter and adjust my segment so that it says, okay, it's people that started this page.

Right. So let's say landing page or came from a certain traffic source. You could set it up to say came from my email. Right. My email traffic source. So I define my segment first. It'll pull up all the screen recordings that match that segment as a starting point. And then you can click through and you can watch them. And I do think there's there's some usefulness to that because you can see a little bit of like hesitation when somebody was looking around for something. Occasionally that comes into play.

But more importantly, when you're going through on the upper right-hand corner of clarity, this is kind of, they kind of buried it, but it is there. When you look in the upper right, there'll be a button that says summarize recordings. And what it'll do is you can ask it, summarize the top 10 of these. So you define that segment. It says, hey, go find the top 10 that are the best fit. And then tell me, generally speaking, what are the trends and patterns you're seeing with those 10? Do you have to type that prompt in or is it smart enough to just

Do you understand what I'm at? Is this like an open prompt? It's a button. No, no. So don't think like AI like ChatGPT where you type anything. It's clicking, clicking on buttons. So you click on a button that says summarize recordings. Right underneath that, it'll say top 10 or custom select, meaning you can say I want this recording, this recording and this other recording and then summarize those. Right. So that's the custom select. Or you can just say top 10. Just give me the top 10.

So what is it doing with that data? It's going through and this is where it's almost, it's exactly what you would do if you were working with ChatGPT in this case, where you might take the screen recordings of the videos, you upload them to ChatGPT, you say, please analyze these recordings from a marketer's perspective and tell me what you think is working or what the challenges are and how we might address any optimization behaviors you see. Something similar to that. Again, you can't see the prompt that they're using, but it's something along those lines. So you

Click on the box. That's what it's doing. It passes the chat TBT. Then you see a little story that'll come back. All you see is the results of that. Where it says, oh, it looks like...

On mobile devices from Apple, they're having a problem seeing they aren't able to make it through the cart because the buy button isn't working. Like I'm making something up, but it has the potential to be able to see that sort of stuff. Really? Yeah, which is really nice. And that's where it comes into setting the power of the segmentation. When you adjust your filters, which is how you adjust segments back there, you can say, I just want to see mobile devices or desktop devices or certain features.

computer types, whatever the OS is, right? That people are looking for or traffic sources, whatever it is. But the better you define that segment, I think the more useful the screen recordings are versus let's say you just started Clarity last week. You have a bunch of data. You haven't set up anything. You haven't done any segments at all. You just go to recordings and you say, summarize the top 10. Well, it's going to pull randomness. It'll be people that see your homepage, people that started on your offer pages, people that started on a blog post. And that's going to be a lot

It's going to give you an answer. It's going to sound confident on its answer, but it isn't going to be that useful because it's too generic in general, but it doesn't know that. Like the tool needs to be told, what do you want it to analyze? So I would always start, especially with screen recordings, with a little segment first. And you can still do that with clarity from that initial dashboard where we talked about things like rage clicks. Like I think that's an important one. Rage clicks is something, again, where somebody's clicking on something and they're not getting a behavior. So it could be your site was just slow to load.

Right. Maybe, maybe that's a thing. It could be the buttons broken, right? Could be, it looks like a button, but there is no link or it was a picture that they thought was a button. And I'm just interpreting it as the way it was designed or whatever the thing is. But what's nice about it is you can click where it says, Hey, rage clicks. And he says, do you want to watch the recording? She's like, yup. You click on it. It builds the segment for you. That is exactly what you need. And then you can have AI analyze it. Then you get something a little more useful from it. But I would always think about what segment are we asking about?

as you go through. I love that. What about with heat maps? Because I know that you've got mobile, tablet, and desktop. Do they have a similar kind of thing going on with heat maps? It's exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly right. So you've got, you've got the, you can click on the desktop version and see all your desktop. You can click on the mobile version. It'll automatically resize for mobile. So you can see what it looks like on mobile and what the heat map is. In other words, how far down are they scrolling or

But what about the AI side of it? Is there some sort of AI component on that? And it has the AI stuff. Yeah. So you can see it and then you can say, same thing, find me a segment of people who went through the user journey or whatever, click on summarize, heat maps in this case, instead of summarize recordings, and it does the same thing. You go to the top 10 or custom select and then you just

Click it in there and it'll write you a story and says, here's basically what we see. The same rules apply. The better the segment is defined, the more useful feedback you're going to get from it. If you say, go to all the users on my site and take a look and tell me what's going on, it's going to give you such a general answer, it won't be useful. But if you say, show me the users who have gone through this particular funnel or came from this particular traffic source and started on this page from that traffic source, then you're going to get some more useful actions from it.

but it'll do in the heat map section, it'll do the heat map, which is where you can see the scroll kind of thing. That's most people sort of associate with that. It'll do what they call a click map. So every time the mouse button's being pressed down or if it's a mobile, every time, you know, little fingers touching it, right? You got the touchscreens. You'll see where they're actually clicking, where,

a mouse button was clicked or again on mobile it's a little tougher because sometimes you know where they're doing it may not maybe for scroll purpose or something but you will literally see what they're virtually touching on the site and where they're going and are those clicks where you want them to be are they are those where they're supposed to be you know so you can see that on a click map and they also have what they call an area map

which is things like if you were curious of how many clicks are going in your top nav versus your bottom nav. So instead of just seeing each individual little click, a little dot where every click is, that's what a click map is. What an area map is, it's just kind of a general section. It says, oh, your top nav gets about 30% of the clicks. The bottom nav gets about 20% of the clicks. And the way you use that

is you already have an idea of what that number is supposed to be. You sort of guess, you say, okay, well, I think that's probably what's going on. Let's go find out if that's true. And you might find like, okay, I expect 30% of the people to go to from the top nav and you get there and it turns out 10% are.

And you're like, well, that's not right. Like maybe more people should be using that. What can we do to maybe change the nav to get more attention to it to get them to go through? Or maybe 75% of the people are using the top nav. That might be so equally bad if they're supposed to be doing something on the body copy that's on that page and not going through the nav.

Right. So those are the sort of things that you can do. And you can exclude segments too, like a popular one. If you have a membership site, you don't want to see all the people who come to your homepage to click on the member login button because they're, they've already been sold. So you can create that segment and exclude them, which is kind of nice. Now you're not looking at all the people who are already your customers coming to your homepage. You can exclude the people who clicked on member login button to go to that. And instead, just look at the people who were looking to explore your brand a little bit more and see how well you did.

when it comes to that. But everything can be summarized with AI, which is, again, the beauty of this tool and such a smart investment from Microsoft's perspective, I guess, from getting involved with ChatGPT so early. Yeah.

Yeah. And I do love the fact that you can save all these segments and name them however you want. And then you can, because if there's certain things you find yourself doing over and over again, you can just save them and they show up under like a little menu thing on the top and then you can get quick access to them. So let's say somebody listening who's a marketer has a product or service or sales page of some sort that

that they want to kind of go a little deeper on, like what would be, in your professional opinion, the things that they should look at? Do you understand what I'm asking? Because there's a lot of stuff we've covered. But if you just want to like install Microsoft Clarity onto your website or onto your specific sales pages, what are the things that you look at or what are the things you recommend students look at?

And then how should we interpret that? Great question. So one of the things I'm very big on is that the tool itself will never save you, but strategies will. So I still think even with Microsoft Clarity, it's important to have a measurement strategy because you need your strategy to dictate how you use your tools and not the other way around.

That's true again, even with Microsoft Clarity. So what I mean by that is a strategy might say, okay, what's the plan for this page? How is this page supposed to work? So let's say it's a long form copy offer page that you have that they might be going through and they have to go to a cart and then a thank you page. So then it's okay, they're going to come to the page. What do I expect to happen? First, the page has got to load. It should be loading pretty quickly, which by the way, Microsoft Clarity can also tell you how fast things loaded or didn't load.

So you can see the page loading. Then did they stick around for at least 10 seconds? Did they scroll halfway down and maybe spend 45 seconds at this point? Did they consider the actual purchase? Are they looking at the pricing table for a little bit of time, right? And then they maybe click to go to the cart.

When you have that, and I'm not saying, at this point, you're not even opening Clarity. You're just thinking through what is the job of this page, of the user journey that you're doing. Let's say we're talking about the offer page. What is the job of this offer page? What are the behaviors that it's supposed to get? And have a picture of that in your mind already, right? Now, we all know not 100% of the people are going to see the

all the pages, especially a long form copy. And you'll get used to this as a marketer. You get experience with it. You start going, okay, well, you know, I figure at least 75% of the people will make it three quarters of the way down, right? Things like that you get used to. So when you, the important part about that is now you have an expectation of what good looks like.

So far, right? So you have your offer page, you kind of have an understanding of how it's supposed to work and what it should be doing. Then you go to Microsoft Clarity and now you're asking Clarity, is this thing doing the thing it's supposed to do? And that's where Clarity can show you. Well, here's what I can do. I can show you a heat map. I can show you a click map. I can show you a scroll map. I can show the area map. I can show you a screen recording so that you can find that out.

but you, because you've already thought about it ahead of time, you already know if it's going to be good or not. So it's not new information. I think a mistake would be the opposite where, and this is what most people do because it's so easy to use these tools, which again, I think Microsoft Clarity is highly recommended, but it is, it is easy to just start with it without

without having an idea of what you're looking for. And then people just sort of explore the platform and poke around. And maybe in the beginning, when you're learning where the bells and whistles are, I think it's perfectly fine. But when you're actually trying to use it for analysis, for improving your marketing, you need to have thought about it ahead of time. What is the thing that is supposed to be happening? Then you go to your analytics tool, whether it's Google Analytics or Clarity. And that analytics tool tells you whether or not the thing is happening or not.

And then because of the thought you've put into it, you'll know, okay, that's not quite happening. Here's some ideas I think I can maybe do to improve things. And that's how that works. If you just went back there, started picking up your pages and looking at them, it presents all this new information and it can be overloading because they go, oh, people with Apple devices do this or these other devices do this. And now you're like, okay, I got a lot of information, but no real action. And you can get overwhelmed, even if it's pictures and screen recordings that can still happen. So always think about ahead of time, what

are the behaviors that are supposed to be happening? Then you use the tools like Clarity to see are those behaviors actually happening? And if so, great, scale traffic. If not, fix the behaviors. Folks, we've just scratched the surface of what you can do with Microsoft Clarity and Mercer will be speaking on this topic at Social Media Marketing World. So you get a chance to actually see it, understand the more advanced things like funnels and actually talk to him.

because he's one of the speakers that sticks around and loves talking to people and helping to explain these things. Can I tell you, last year, that happened for almost like 45 minutes after the session. There was just a crowd outside and it was so awesome to be able to sit there. And then there was a smaller crowd. Then we were all sitting around a table that we had out there. It was so intensely cool from a speaker's perspective to be able to help everybody out. And I think honestly, from an attendee's perspective, to be able to have that access to the speakers, definitely take advantage of that.

Thank you, Mercer. Well, first of all, thank you for sharing at least the opening basics into what people need to get started with, with Microsoft Clarity. If people want to connect with you on the socials, what is your preferred platform? And if they want to check out all the great things you have to offer, where do you want to send them?

Absolutely. So primarily YouTube. I'm on LinkedIn a little bit, but not very often. But YouTube's the best. So measureu.com forward slash YouTube. We'll take you to the YouTube channel. You can check out what we've got. Lots of free training there. You can subscribe to our content there. And we also have a free community membership that we offer as well, which comes with a ton of tools. We've got free training that goes on. We've done free training on Clarity as well as Google Analytics and other tools that you can get some experience with. So if you're interested in that, just go to measureu.com forward slash YouTube.

S-M-M-P for social media marketing podcast. So again, measureu.com forward slash S-M-M-P. And just for the listening audience, it's the letter U, not Y-O-U. So measure the letter U slash S-M-M-P. Mercer, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights with us. Appreciate it. Thanks again for having me, Mike.

Hey, if you missed anything, and I know you probably did, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 650. Man, 650 episodes. That's crazy. 650 weeks. By the way, if you're new to the show, thank you so much. Follow us on whatever you're listening to us on. And if you've been a listener for a little while, I

I would love a review on whatever app you're using. And also, can you share this with a friend? Maybe tag me. I'm at Stelzner on Facebook, at Stelzner on LinkedIn, and at Mike underscore Stelzner on X. And if you're into AI, be sure to check out my other show, AI Explored. And we also have another show called the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm

I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. Sunny San Diego is calling. Grab your tickets to Social Media Marketing World 2025 right now at socialmediamarketingworld.info. I can't wait to see you there.