Microsoft Clarity vs Google Analytics: Which Web Analytics Tool Worked For Us?
Tags: analytics, microsoftclarity, googleanalytics, startup
Published: 2023-04-19 15:18:57

For user analytics, we ([CoursePilot](http://coursepilot.co)) are using Microsoft Clarity. 

For the remaining post, **_we_** represents we, here at ([CoursePilot](http://coursepilot.co)), and **_I_**, represents myself, the developer who coded the site.

If you are wondering which web analytics tool, Microsoft Clarity or Google Analytics, is right for you, maybe seeing our reasons for choosing Microsoft Clarity will help you. 

As a starting point, we also looked into Hotjar, Plausible, Fathom, and Matomo, but we wanted an easy-to-integrate, forever free plan to start with so we ended up deciding between Microsoft Clarity and Google Analytics. Both Microsoft Clarity and Google Analytics are free (in Google Analytics case, it has a freemium model) but the tools that Microsoft Clarity and Google Analytics provide are slightly different.

Whilst Microsoft Clarity focuses more on how the user interacts with the site, Google Analytics predominantly tracks and reports website traffic. 

From our research online, most reviews on Microsoft Clarity and Google Analytics recognise the outstanding points of Microsoft Clarity but still favour Google Analytics so why did we choose Microsoft Clarity?

## Business Use
We wanted to focus on the quality of the website, so yes we do want to see where the traffic is coming from but our priority is to see how we can improve user experience.

Microsoft Clarity offers this exactly. It’s very easy to see where the traffic is coming from in the “Referrers” section. At this stage, that is really all we want to see in terms of traffic referrals. 


![Microsoft Clarity Dashboard](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/4283th3yozejfz2iwndl.png)


What has been incredibly valuable is to see recordings and heatmaps. Without Clarity, the only other way we could think of to achieve this would be to ask individual users to record how they interact with the site themselves, which is burdensome and expensive, if you’re using a third party user testing organisation. 

The recordings and heatmaps show us what people are really interested in, where they might get frustrated (e.g. rage clicks, dead clicks and quickbacks) and what they did right before an error occurred. 

This really helps us to prioritise features. For example, from our analysis on user usage so far, we’ve seen that we should probably add the price of courses on the “All Courses” page, either as text or as a sorting mechanism. 

Other KPI measurements that Microsoft Clarity offer are: popular pages, countries, devices and operating systems. 

We can see that as at 19 April 2023, 26 days after our launch date, the three most popular pages now are: CodeFirstGirls, Le Wagon and Northcoders. 


![Microsoft Clarity Dashboard](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/hk35kahs8wazkf97jw9g.gif)


## Personal Preference 
Personally, I don't mind the Google Analytics sign up and integration process, but Microsoft Clarity is so much quicker and easier. It only took about 2 minutes to sign up and 10 seconds to integrate the code (because it really is just copying and pasting the script that Microsoft Clarity provides you). For us, the data showed up in less than 30 minutes. 

The dashboard is so much more user-friendly than Google Analytics. Everything is intuitive and easy to understand for someone who does not have a background in data analysis.

Having used Google Analytics previously, I used to spend at least half an hour hunting down the KPI I wanted to see, often Googling what certain measurements meant. The Google Analytics dashboard felt crowded, I really struggled to focus on a particular metric. Eventually, I stopped looking at it altogether. 


![Google Analytics Dashboard - Home](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/npjoe7418bdoysjfejr0.png)

![Google Analytics Dashboard - Audience](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/mnk9bak1gcsrx4kdgd6w.png)


## Some downsides of Microsoft Clarity 

Microsoft Clarity itself recognises that it does not have as many metrics as Google Analytics, which is why it offers the ability to connect with Google Analytics so that links to session recordings can be accessed from a Google Analytics dashboard.

Down the line, if we carry out advertising and/or sales campaigns, we may have to supplement Microsoft Clarity with an additional service (unlikely to be Google Analytics out of personal preference) but we are very happy with what we have for now, which is probably why we’re beginning to sound like a Microsoft Clarity salesperson. 

Let us know if this has been helpful! 

What analytics tools are you using?