One of our favorite free tools for tourism marketing is Microsoft Clarity. If you’ve seen or used Hot Jar before, you’ll find that this is really similar with absolutely no fees.
Microsoft Clarity provides heat maps and session recording to show you how people are using your website. The main thing we use is the heat maps.
There are two types of heat maps that we use regularly, and both of them let you see separate reports for mobile users and desktop users.
Click Heat Maps
The first is click heat maps. This shows you where people are clicking and tapping on your web pages. Why does this matter?
First of all, because people might surprise you. We’ve seen instances where people are trying to click on items that aren’t clickable. This shows a friction point. People want more information about something, and we’re not letting them get the information in the way they expect, causing them to run into what Clarity calls a dead click. We wouldn’t have known about the problem without the heat map data.
But it’s not just errors that we find with this heat map. Sometimes it simply helps us understand the most popular content on the page. For example, you can see which FAQs people click on the most, which can help you decide which ones should be listed first or should be promoted to other places on the page. With some work, you can track this in Google Analytics and create a really useful report, which we often do, but that requires some technical expertise that Clarity just doesn’t require.
Scroll Heat Maps
Another useful heat map is a scroll heat map. These will show you how far down a page people are scrolling—again, on desktop or mobile. The benefit here is obvious: you may find that people are scrolling less than expected, leaving some of your most important information unseen by most of your website visitors. This report can help you determine how to arrange the items on your page.
Microsoft Clarity is one of those tools that you can try right now. It takes just a few minutes to create an account and install the tool so it’s collecting data, and then in just a couple of days you can start digging into insights that will help you improve your site.
For more tips, check out all of our Tourism Marketing Quick Tips!
