Hotel Marketing Podcast Episode 194: Is Microsoft’s Clarity The Secret To An Improved Hotel Conversion Rate?
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Clarity, Microsoft’s revolutionary user behavior analytics tool, made a big splash several months ago as a way you can gain great insight into how your customers engage with your site. However, since launch we have heard very little about the platform. This doesn’t mean forget about it, it just means that there’s been a LOT going on in the world since it was first launched in October 2020.
Today we are going to discuss why you don’t want to forget about Clarity, secrets you don’t know about the platform, where it differs from Google Analytics, and how you can use it to drive revenue.
First of all, what is Microsoft Clarity? It’s a free, and very easy to implement, visual analytics tool that allows you to see click maps, screen recordings and more. What it’s not is a full featured analytics platform and is not something to take the place of Google Analytics.
4 Ways Hotels Can Use Clarity
- Friction Finding Tools will help you find missed opportunities. These include three very helpful tools such as “rage clicks,” “dead clicks,” and “quick backs.”
- Rage Clicks – User rapidly clicked or tapped in same small area
- Dead Clicks – User clicked or tapped on a page with no effect
- Quick Backs – User navigated to a page and quickly returned to the previous one
- Screen recording gives you great insights and qualitative data to serve as a STARTING point for site optimizations.
- Data-rich heatmaps show you where and how customers navigate your site.
- Scroll maps allow you to see what data is shown on any given page and where your “average fold” is for consumers by device type.
5 Powerful Secrets of Microsoft Clarity for Hotels
- The filters are really awesome now and allow you to filter data down to referring sites, sources, mediums, or even specific campaigns. This is beyond the basics of pages, entry/exit locations, etc. Best of all, it uses Google’s UTM tags so you don’t have to do anything in advance to be able to unlock the insights.
- You can filter data down to the individual user level. By knowing a unique user ID you can isolate and view a single user’s recordings, heatmaps and more.
- It also allows you to view screen recordings based on a variety of filters including device types, operating systems, & browsers. This can help identify UX issues associated with those filters and start a CRO optimization plan.
- Clarity and Google Analytics can work together and allow you to get the most out of both platforms. By connecting your GA account with Clarity you are able to find anomalies in GA and then seamlessly jump to Clarity to see the event in action.
- Developers can benefit from Clarity via the JavaScript error tool that shows (with recordings) where customers are having technical issues.
Frequently Asked Questions About Microsoft Clarity
Is Clarity easy to install?
Incredibly easy. Clarity has a single code snippet that, once installed, does the rest. Since it relies on your existing GA UTM tracking there’s no need to do anything else to start using the platform. However, we suggest you integrate your Google Analytics and Clarity accounts to make the most of both systems.
How does Microsoft Clarity handle privacy?
Clarity does a pretty good job with privacy, even considering they are recording site engagement. All personal information is cloaked and all data entered in form fields are blocked from view. However, Clarity can go overboard and hide ANY information that could be seen as personal, including the phone numbers on your site, your property address, and more. Fortunately, this can be avoided with proper tagging of contact information in your code.
Will Microsoft Clarity replace Google Analytics?
No, Clarity won’t replace GA. While there’s great information in both platforms it is different types of data. We would think the bigger question is will Google Analytics create their own version of Clarity, probability named, “More Clarity.”
What’s the future for Microsoft Clarity?
That may not mean much to us hoteliers, but for developers this is huge and will allow the platform to grow much more organically and quickly to meet the needs of users. Think of WordPress as the most well-known open source platforms and how there are endless ways to tailor the system to meet your needs. If the analytics world leans in on Clarity it could create an amazing opportunity for data insights.
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In The News:
50% Of Hospitality Workers Won’t Return To Fill Openings.
No pay increase or incentive would make these workers return to their previous workplace, according to a poll of about 13,000 job seekers during the second quarter from Joblist, an employment-search engine.
- 52% want a different working environment
- 45% want higher pay
- 29% better benefits
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60 Seconds To Success:
SEO Tip: Use this regex in Google Search Console queries:
Google Search Console has typically only allowed for “contains” or “does not contain” type filtering. This is incredibly limiting when considering misspellings, multiple variants, or if you are unsure of a specific term. Google has just rolled out regular expression, or regex, as a search option. Regex is a string of characters that specifies a rule to perform advanced search such as the below.
^(who|what|where|when|why|how)[” “]
This isn’t just nerdy searches/filters. Consider using regex searches when reviewing your performance to find insights that may be hidden.
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Submit your questions and topic ideas on Twitter to @_travelboom or info@travelboommarketing.com.
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