Microsoft Clarity: What It Shows, and Clarity vs Hotjar

The four signals Clarity surfaces on a page that looked fine in GA4 — and where each one usually points.

What is Microsoft Clarity?

Microsoft Clarity is a behaviour-analytics tool: instead of counting visitors, it shows you what they did. It records sessions you can replay, aggregates clicks and scrolls into heatmaps, and tags the moments where people got stuck.

That makes it the "see behaviour" layer of the stack we map in our marketing analytics guide. GA4 tells you 400 people reached your enquiry page and 12 submitted the form. Clarity shows you the other 388 — the ones who clicked a card that was not a button, scrolled past the form twice, or left within seconds.

Two things make Clarity unusual for a Microsoft product. It is free with no paid tier at all, and it is genuinely simple: a marketing manager with no analytics background can find a broken element in an afternoon.

What does Microsoft Clarity show you?

Clarity has four things worth knowing about. Everything else in the interface is a filter on top of these.

1. Heatmaps. Microsoft's heatmaps documentation lists five types: click maps (where people click and how often), scroll maps (how far down they get, including the "average fold"), area maps (total clicks inside a region you draw), attention maps ("the amount of time users spent on each part of the page") and conversion maps for e-commerce sites. If you want the full explainer on reading a heatmap, our heatmap tools guide owns that; this page stays on Clarity itself.

2. Session recordings. A replay of one visitor's session — cursor, clicks, scrolls, page changes — with the visitor's typed input masked (more on masking below). Per the Clarity FAQ, recordings are kept for 30 days, while favourited recordings and a random sample are kept for up to 9 months. Heatmap data is available for up to 9 months.

3. Frustration signals. This is the part GA4 cannot do. Microsoft's semantic metrics page defines each one:

• Rage clicks — the user "clicks multiple times in a clustered area in rapid succession". Usually a thing that looks clickable and is not.
• Dead clicks — a click "on an element but gets no feedback in a reasonable amount of time". Broken buttons, slow requests, misleading design.
• Quick backs — the user navigates to a new page and returns "in shorter time than defined threshold". They did not find what the link promised.
• Excessive scrolling — "higher amounts of vertical scrolling than the expected average". Often someone hunting for a price or a phone number.
• JavaScript errors and click errors — sessions where a script broke, tagged automatically so you can watch what the visitor saw.

4. Copilot. Clarity's Copilot documentation describes AI-generated session insights (a written summary of one recording), grouped session insights (takeaways across many recordings at once), heatmap insights, and a chat box you can question in plain English. Microsoft's own docs warn the model "can sometimes misinterpret or generate incorrect information" — use the summaries to decide which recordings to watch, not as the finding itself.

Is Microsoft Clarity really free?

Yes, and Microsoft is unusually explicit about it. The Clarity homepage says "Free forever. Built to grow with your business. No limits on traffic." The FAQ goes further: "Clarity is 100% free - forever. You're never asked to upgrade to a paid version. No credit card is required to sign up", "there are no traffic limits", and "No sampling (that is, tracking only a portion of your site's traffic)."

Those three statements — free, no traffic cap, no sampling — are the whole reason Clarity wins the comparison below for most sites. The honest cost is the 30-day recording window and the fact that you are giving Microsoft first-party behavioural data from your site, which is the same trade you already make with Google Analytics.

How to set up Microsoft Clarity and review it in week one

Setup takes under fifteen minutes. The routine at the end is what most teams skip, and it is where the value is.

1. Create a project at clarity.microsoft.com. Sign in with an account the business controls, not a freelancer's personal login. One project per website; Microsoft's setup guide notes "each website you add to your Clarity account has its unique tracking code."
2. Install the tracking code. Either paste the snippet from Settings → Setup into your site's <head>, or use the Google Tag Manager option — Clarity detects GTM, asks you to pick the account and container, then does "Create and publish" for you. If your site already runs GA4 through Tag Manager, use GTM so every tag lives in one place; our Google Tag Manager guide covers the container basics.
3. Set the masking mode before traffic flows. Settings → Masking. Balanced is the default; if you handle medical, financial or student data, consider Strict and unmask only what you need (details in the privacy section).
4. Connect Google Analytics. Settings → Setup → Google Analytics integration → sign in and pick the GA4 web property. Microsoft's integration doc says this lets "Clarity pull data from your Google Analytics and display it directly in the Clarity experience", and that "you can only add one web property" per project.
5. Add your UTM convention to your links. Clarity's Traffic filters read utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, so a tagged Meta or Google Ads campaign can be replayed on its own.
6. Day 3: open Recordings, filter by Rage clicks. Watch five. Then Dead clicks, then Quick backs. Write down every element that appears twice.
7. Day 5: open the scroll map for your top landing page and check where the average fold sits relative to your form or WhatsApp button.
8. Day 7: fix the one repeat offender, then save a segment (the filter set) so next week's check is one click.

What does the GA4 integration actually do?

It brings GA4 numbers into Clarity, not the other way round. Clarity does not push its rage-click data into your GA4 reports.

Once connected, a Google Analytics dashboard appears inside Clarity. Per Microsoft's GA dashboard doc, it shows an audience overview (sessions, session duration), an acquisition report (channel, source/medium), popular pages, and sessions by country and device — and "as you navigate through each of these metrics, you can view the corresponding Heatmaps or Recordings filtered to the applied time frame."

In practice that means: see in GA4 that paid social sessions are up but form submissions are flat, click through to the recordings for that slice, and watch what those visitors did instead of converting. The GA4 guide in this cluster covers the events and key events you are matching against.

How to read Clarity: filters, segments and smart events

Clarity's power is in its filters. Microsoft's filters overview lists more than 30, grouped into User info, User actions, Path, Traffic, Performance, Product, Session, Page and Custom. The five you will use every week:

• User actions → Insights: Rage clicks, Dead clicks, Excessive scrolling, Quick backs. Start every review here.
• Path → Visited URL: restrict to one page, such as /enquiry/ or /pricing/.
• User info → Device: mobile versus desktop. In India, most of your problems will be on mobile.
• Traffic → Source / Medium / Campaign: one ad campaign's visitors, by UTM.
• User actions → Smart events: sessions where a business action happened — or did not.

Smart events are Clarity's no-code conversion tracking. According to the smart events doc, Clarity automatically detects nine types — Purchase, Add to Cart, Begin Checkout, Contact Us, Submit Form, Request Quote, Sign Up, Login, Download — and admins can define up to 20 custom events from button clicks, page visits or auto events. The useful move is the negative filter: sessions on the enquiry page where "Submit Form" did not fire. Those are your lost leads, in replay.

Clarity also builds funnels from ordered smart events, which is enough for a simple "landing page → form start → form submit" view without touching GA4 Explorations.

Privacy and masking: what Clarity hides by default

Clarity masks all input boxes and dropdowns in every mode, and that cannot be switched off. Everything else depends on the masking mode you choose.

Microsoft's masking documentation defines three modes: Strict (all content masked), Balanced (the default — numbers and email addresses masked, along with inputs), and Relaxed (page text shown, inputs and dropdowns still masked). You can override either way per element with data-clarity-mask="true" or data-clarity-unmask="true", or by CSS selector under Settings → Masking.

Two India-specific cautions. First, Balanced masks numbers, so a fee card reading "₹45,000" will show as blanks in recordings — fine for privacy, confusing when you are trying to see which price a visitor rage-clicked. Unmask that one element deliberately rather than switching the whole site to Relaxed. Second, a clinic, a lender or a coaching institute that displays a logged-in student's name or marks on a page should run Strict and unmask the layout, not the data.

Consent is separate from masking. Microsoft says Clarity "requires explicit consent" before placing cookies in the EEA, UK and Switzerland; India is not on that list, but session recording is still processing of personal data. Read our DPDP Act guide for marketers for what notice and consent you need in place, and treat Clarity's cookie consent setting as one more tag your consent banner governs.

Clarity vs Hotjar: which should you use?

For heatmaps and recordings, Clarity does the core job free with no traffic cap and no sampling; Hotjar's advantage was always the survey and feedback layer. One thing has changed that most comparison posts still miss: Hotjar no longer exists as a standalone product. Hotjar's site redirects to Contentsquare, whose Hotjar page states "Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare. The two platforms have merged into a single, more powerful experience intelligence platform", and the Contentsquare help centre dates the merger to 1 July 2025. So "Hotjar free plan" today means the Contentsquare Free plan, and its limits come from the Contentsquare pricing page (checked 10 September 2026).

Verdict: run Clarity on every site, from day one. Add Contentsquare only when you need to ask visitors a question on the page — a survey after checkout, a feedback widget on a pricing page — because that is the one thing a recording cannot tell you. For the wider field of testing and personalisation tools, our CRO tools comparison owns that ground.

Worked example: a coaching institute's enquiry page

An illustrative scenario, not a client result. Say a JEE coaching institute in Mumbai runs Google Ads to /enquiry/. GA4 shows a healthy click-through, 600 landing-page sessions a week, and 14 enquiries. That is the whole story GA4 can tell.

In Clarity, you filter Recordings to Visited URL = /enquiry/, Device = Mobile, Insights = Rage clicks. Suppose 41 sessions match. You watch five. In every one, the visitor taps the "Two-year programme · ₹1,20,000" fee card three or four times. It has a drop shadow and a chevron; it looks like a button. It is a static <div>.

The click map confirms it: the fee card is the second-most-clicked element on the page, above the actual "Book a free counselling call" button. The scroll map shows the average fold on mobile sits just above the form. Copilot's grouped session insight reads roughly: users repeatedly click the programme cards and leave without submitting.

The fix is a morning's work. Make each fee card open its batch details, move the WhatsApp button above the cards, and re-check the same segment in seven days. Whether enquiries rise is a GA4 question — and if you want certainty, an A/B test. Clarity's job was to find the card. This is exactly how we use it inside performance marketing engagements: paid traffic buys the sessions, Clarity shows why they did not convert.

Mistakes that make Clarity useless

• Installing it and never opening it. Recordings expire in 30 days. If nobody reviews weekly, you are collecting nothing.
• Watching random recordings. Always filter first — rage clicks on one URL, not "all sessions".
• Treating ten recordings as a statistic. Ten people stalling on a field is a hypothesis. The number comes from GA4 or a test.
• Leaving your own team's sessions in. Clarity supports blocking internal IP addresses in Settings, per its FAQ — add your office and your agency's IPs, or your designer's testing becomes your "rage clicks".
• Switching to Relaxed masking to see prices. Unmask the one element instead.
• Forgetting consent. A recording tool without a notice is a DPDP problem waiting to be noticed.

Where to go from here

Install Clarity today, connect GA4, and put a fifteen-minute rage-click review in the calendar for the same day every week. Once you are fixing pages rather than just watching them, the heatmap-reading guide and the A/B testing guide linked above are the next two reads.