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Next Generation Behavioral Analysis Tool: Microsoft Clarity

To analyze the users visiting your site and make your current site compatible with user experience (UX), you need next-generation behavioral analytics tools.At this point, Microsoft Clarity comes into play as a next-generation behavioral analytics tool. If you haven’t heard of Microsoft Clarity before, don’t worry. In this article, we will answer the question “What is Microsoft Clarity?” in detail and share the nuances of how you can use Clarity to perform analyses and make your site UX-compliant.What Is Microsoft Clarity?Microsoft Clarity is a free behavioral analytics tool launched by Microsoft in 2020 that transforms user data into visual insights and shows which parts of your website receive the most interaction. It offers features such as dashboards, heatmaps, session recordings, rage clicks, and dead clicks to help you easily analyze issues that frustrate users.Microsoft Clarity tracks users’ movements on your website to measure and analyze site performance. By measuring every user interaction, it guides you to improve your site’s quality and eliminate errors.In addition to being free, Microsoft Clarity has no traffic limits and is optimized not to slow down your site, making it more advantageous and preferable compared to other behavioral analytics tools.Thanks to its lack of traffic limits, even sites with very high traffic (e.g., 1 million daily visits) can easily use Clarity. Because it is optimized not to slow down page load times, it has less impact on page performance than other tools, ensuring that users don’t have to wait and thus positively impacting user experience. With its intuitive interface, detailed filtering options, heatmaps, and session recordings, you can perform a detailed UX analysis of your site; detect dead clicks, rage clicks, and JavaScript errors on your platforms, and improve the current situation.What Are the Features of Microsoft Clarity?The most critical and important feature of Microsoft Clarity for brand and UX analysts is its control panel.In addition to the control panel, with Clarity you can see which page visits users have made on your site (via the Recordings section) and exactly where each visitor clicked (via the Heatmaps section), and from that you can refine your UX analyses.If we look at each page, first let’s see what greets us on the Dashboard:DashboardAs you can see in the image below, once you create your site project in the tool and complete the necessary setup, a dashboard appears where you can easily view all detailed parameters. The control panel provides a general overview of your site visitors’ performance and behavior, allowing you to analyze site traffic in detail and perform aggregate measurements. You can track users’ page movements and view any errors they encountered during their session in detail.In summary, the control panel provides a series of website metrics, which can be described as follows: Sessions: The number of sessions users have on your website, shown as Total Sessions on the dashboard. Pages per Session: The average number of pages per session that users view on your site. Scroll Depth: The percentage of the page that users scroll down on your site. Time Spent: Displays how long users spend on your site actively and inactively. While metrics like Sessions and Scroll Depth inform us about session counts and durations, the metrics below use click data to reveal errors users encounter and the clicks that caused them: Dead Clicks: When users click on an element on your site but get no response. Dead clicks often indicate broken links or JavaScript errors. Rage Clicks: When a user repeatedly clicks in one area, usually due to frustration from dead clicks. Rage clicks can point to insufficient target sizes or misleading visual design. Excessive Scrolling: When a user scrolls up and down a page more frequently than average. Excessive scrolling can indicate poor discoverability or irrelevant content. Quick Backs: When users quickly return to the previous page after navigating to a page. High quick-back rates may indicate misleading or inaccurate content descriptions. You can also analyze which locations and devices users come from and which pages or products they view most often on your site: Most Viewed Products: On an e-commerce site, shows which product receives the most views. Popular Pages: Displays the most visited pages on your site. Referrers: Shows which external pages users came from to visit your site. Browsers: Displays which browsers users use to access your site, helping segment the audience more meaningfully. Devices: Shows which devices users use to visit your site, aiding audience analysis. Countries: Displays the countries from which users visit your site, allowing you to tailor site design to your audience. The filter at the top of the control panel lets you customize analyses by page, date, or device, making Clarity an exceptional experience for UX analysis.RecordingsThe Recordings page lets you watch recordings of user sessions on your site. Using the Recording section, you can replay each visitor’s page visits and see exactly where they clicked, what they scrolled, paused on, and which other pages they navigated to. By applying filters for dead clicks, rage clicks, or JavaScript errors, you can focus on those sessions and create an action plan to minimize these issues.The Recordings page displays user sessions as a timeline and allows you to play back each session like a video, making Clarity a must-have next-gen behavioral analytics tool for UX analysts. In addition to tracking cursor movements and clicks, recordings also provide details like entry and exit URLs, session duration, date, and device. The “Skip Inactive” button helps you save time by skipping long idle periods when reviewing multiple sessions.Recordings also reveal how long users waited during a session and give insights into page load times, which can inform your SEO efforts. The “More Details” option on each video presents a timeline of user actions, giving you deeper insights into both sessions and users.HeatmapsMicrosoft Clarity’s heatmaps help you easily understand how users interact with a page by visualizing sessions with color gradients from red to blue. Warmer colors (reds) show areas with high click density, while cooler colors (blues) indicate areas with low interaction.This feature lets you see exactly where users clicked and how far they scrolled, offering clues about why and how they reached specific areas. Clarity provides three types of heatmaps for in-depth UX analysis: Click Heatmaps: Shows clicks by desktop, mobile, or tablet users on your site. Scroll Heatmaps: Displays the percentage of the page viewed by users as they scroll down. Area Heatmaps: Indicates regional clicks by desktop, mobile, or tablet users on your site. By filtering click and area click data for specific date ranges, you can identify which areas of your site’s homepage were most engaging. For example, during Black Friday, you might find that users clicked most on “Women > Jeans.” Further analysis may reveal that mobile users most often clicked “Mom Jeans,” size 32/33, in Dark Blue, but encountered dead clicks on the size filter, preventing them from reaching the cart. This indicates a need for quick fixes in that area to improve conversion.Additionally, for future campaigns, you could use remarketing to target mobile users interested in “Mom Jeans,” size 32/33, Dark Blue, thereby improving conversion rates. From these examples and Clarity’s versatile panels, it’s clear that Microsoft Clarity is arguably the best next-gen behavioral analytics tool for UX analysis on your sites.We hope this article encourages you to integrate Microsoft Clarity more into your UX analyses.See you in our next article...

How to Build a Successful Brand Community

Are you looking for ways to have better and stronger communication with your audience? If so, you’re on the right track, because building a brand community will certainly carry your customer relationships to a different level.Brand communities can be described as a place where your most loyal customers are branded together. They feel lucky to be involved as they find like-minded people in a community.This useful guide here is to help you better understand what a brand community is, why it would be important for your company, and how it should be created.So, let’s quickly roll to the important part!What is a brand community?A brand community can be described as a group of people who not only falls under the "customer" expression but those who feel an emotional connection with the brand.People who buy from your company, also love to see your content, influence others with it, and frequently engage with are the keystones of your brand community.But be careful with one thing that is often misleading: Having a brand community doesn't have to do with increasing brand awareness.While brand awareness stands for people who have purchased from your company or at least know about the company, the brand community represents people who enjoy almost anything about your brand.Why should you create a brand community?Really, why shouldn’t you? It is a very easy and strong way to have a bridge between your brand and your most loyal customers.Having a brand community created you can test your brand’s new features and products, collect feedback, and generally improve your brand in light of your regular customers’ reviews, which will make you have customer-driven decisions for your brand.You should also know that your brand community probably already exists somewhere on social media. What you need to do is to find the community, connect with it and build a strategy to keep it going and growing.Sounds appealing, right? Then let’s move on to the how-to part.How to build a successful brand community?Now that you are aware of your people’s existence, it’s time to reach and bring them together, and give them a familiar feeling that will make them feel belong.There is not only one approach to creating a strong and successful brand community, there are many various ways to achieve that.Let’s go through a few essential steps, so you can decide which brand community is right for you. 1. Describe your brand For starters, you should make sure you know what your brand is, which goes above and beyond your brand’s offers and sells. Your company’s objective, vision, personality, and brand voice all matter here. What does your brand want to be known for, what is it trying to do and why, and who does it want to influence? Setting on these crucial details will make you promote your brand’s core values, and attract the target audience. 2. Set your goal and metrics As we mentioned above, brand communities have the advantage of giving you a way to base choices on client feedback, and many more. But you should take some time to ask yourself some questions before starting a brand community. Questions like these might point you in the correct direction as you create a strategy for your brand community. Are we assisting people with questions related to our product or their professions? What are the metrics we want to track? Which purpose will the brand community mainly serve? What are we / will be doing for our community members to keep them engaged? Once you determine the answers to these questions and set your goals and metrics, you can move on to the next steps. 3. Choose a platform There are some different platforms you can choose to use to engage with your brand community. First, consider the pros and cons, the native behaviors, and activities to choose from, then use either one or a few of them that will work the best for your audience and the brand itself. Social Media We can't think of a brand without social media usage. Social media is a trendy and easy option to use for creating your brand community. In creating a brand community in social media channels, you can either create an account/page for your community to follow and stay engaged, or you can create a private group where your loyal customers can join and stay connected. An example of using social media to create a brand community can be Ring Concierge. The jewelry retailer’s Instagram page, which is run by the owner of the brand herself, has more than 500,000 followers. She uses their Instagram page transparently and frequently gets in touch with their customers through interactive stories where she holds Q&As and finds out their audience’s opinions on potential new products. Communities can be built by a simple brand hashtag, which adds credibility and user-generated content to the feed page. And another way to use social media for building a brand community is through social media groups where your customers can join and interact with each other and your brand. Instant Pot, an electric multi-cooker manufacturer has a Facebook group with over 5 million member, which creates an international space for their customers to share unique recipes, ask questions, and share the joy of cooking using their products. They also offer trouble-shooting in case any of their customers face an issue or have product- related questions, and occasionally hold giveaways for their members within the group. Forums Although they sound a little outdated, forums are still great for larger communities to discuss products and interests. EA's (Electronic Arts) forums can be a good example of this. The company that has published a wide amount of video games to this date has managed to gather its customers into one community, and it works perfectly for them. Not only it allows people to discuss the games they are playing, find solutions, and even talk about shared interests, but it also benefits EA in ways. Thanks to their forums, EA can easily learn about the problems with their products, keep the thrill of their games going and reach out to gamers for announcements. They can also find out what their customers would like to see in EA's future games and make customer-driven decisions. Third-party community platforms Many brands have used third-party community platforms to lay their brand communities on, and been able to connect with their customers directly. Platforms such as Slack, Mobilizer, and Discord allow you to create various channels and threads for your community members where they can check out and interact with others. Gucci, for example, has created their own Discord server named “GucciVault” as a part of their NFT strategy, where they could directly get in touch with their customers and allow them to talk about NFT-related topics. The luxury clothing brand had offered special roles and perks for its first 20,000 members, and it took less than two days to hit the mark. Loyalty programs Another way to develop your brand community is to create a rewarding membership program for your most loyal customers. An example of a rewards program that works on a give-back or referrals basis is Starbucks, which gives regular customer perks. Members using the Starbucks app earn Stars that add up on each order and return as perks such as free drinks or shots. As well as on orders, members also earn Stars through referring the app to their friends which in return ends up bringing more members and building a bigger and better community. 4. Engage with your brand community Now that you've finished creating your brand community, all you need to do is to keep going with engaging with your community. Responding quickly and caring about their opinions by creating conversations and discussions will keep them engaged with your brand. In short, give your community a reason to stay connected as it grows bigger and bigger!

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Youtube SEO: Tips to Increase Your Video Ranking

YouTube SEO generally refers to the optimization process aimed at improving the ranking of your videos and channel on YouTube for relevant topics. YouTube is the second most used search engine in the world. Like all search engines, this platform has its own complex algorithm. By optimizing video content, you aim to increase important metrics gained through YouTube such as subscriber count, website visits, and channel awareness (brand).As with all search engine ranking algorithms, no one knows YouTube’s ranking algorithms exactly. You should optimize your channel page, playlists, metadata, video descriptions, and other key metrics. By optimizing the videos on your YouTube channel, you also improve visibility on other search engines like Google, Yandex, and Bing.What Is YouTube SEO?Before diving into what YouTube SEO is and how to apply it, let’s briefly discuss SEO. If you’re new to SEO, read on!There are many definitions of SEO, but our goal with SEO is to improve the ranking of a web page (not the entire site, since search engines rank individual pages) in search engine results pages, thereby driving quality traffic and conversions to the site.Search engines evaluate the information on websites and pages to display the results that best match a user’s query.Web search engines use their own proprietary algorithms to show relevant content to users. Similarly, social media platforms have their own internal algorithms.YouTube uses different algorithms when showing videos on its platform. Therefore, you need to perform YouTube SEO to get your channel’s videos shown to more users.How to Do YouTube SEO?When doing SEO for YouTube, you should always use transcripts—the text of your video. Including target keywords naturally in the transcript will significantly help your ranking in SERPs. When choosing keywords for YouTube SEO, do thorough research and include them naturally in your video optimization.Here are YouTube SEO tips to increase the ranking potential of your videos: Include your important target keywords in video titles and descriptions, If possible, add captions to your videos and mention keywords in your speech, If you use text overlays in your videos, explicitly include your keywords, Consider adding related videos as cards on your channel, Ensure you select the most relevant category for your video, Use custom thumbnails and include keywords in the image file names, Use tags on your videos and make sure to include your keywords, Add links and CTAs to your videos, When choosing content topics for YouTube, examine Google Trends data. What Is the Logic Behind YouTube SEO?On October 9, 2006, Google acquired YouTube, then a video platform and now the world’s second most popular search engine.Google, YouTube, Bing, Yandex, and all other search engines share one goal: to provide their users with the best possible search experience.For example, imagine you search “SEO Evolution” on YouTube. YouTube’s bots crawl all channels and videos on the platform to show the most relevant result to the user.These bots consider several factors to show the best results.To determine which videos provide a good user experience, bots may test different algorithmic scenarios.They may rank a video with a filled-in title, tags, description, and metadata higher than one without. Videos with sufficient comments and engagement tend to rank above those lacking titles or engagement.The core logic is that the algorithm estimates which content will deliver the best user experience and serves it based on past searches and likes.Your YouTube SEO efforts help your videos rank not only on YouTube but also in Google’s video search results.Boost Your Video Rankings with YouTube SEO TipsEven if you follow all SEO guidelines for platforms like YouTube and Google, complex algorithmic calculations may still affect your rankings.Let’s explore YouTube SEO tips to move your videos up in the search results.Keyword ResearchChoosing and using the right keywords is crucial for Google, YouTube, other search engines, and websites. Keywords help visitors understand the topic of the content.Correct usage of keywords on YouTube helps the platform identify, index, and match your video to user queries.When uploading a video to YouTube, you can add keywords to specific fields like the title, tags, and description—be sure to do so meaningfully.Knowing which keywords to add to your channel videos helps you get discovered and drive more traffic.We recommend starting with YouTube itself for keyword research. Just as with Google’s autocomplete, YouTube’s search suggestions can reveal valuable keywords for your videos.Another method is to analyze competitor channels producing content on the same topic. Check the titles, tags, and descriptions they use.Free tools for YouTube keyword research: Keywords Everywhere: A free Chrome extension that provides monthly search volumes and related keywords on YouTube and Google. Google Trends: Helps you see seasonal trends for keywords. VidIQ: A free Chrome extension that gives statistical insights and keyword data for any YouTube videos or channels. We recommend focusing on long-tail keywords. Although they have lower search volume, they often offer higher reach potential. Highly competitive keywords are harder to rank for, whereas long-tail terms can rank more easily.Create Compelling, Attention-Grabbing Video TitlesTitles are one of the first things users see: they should include your main target keywords. Video titles are a key factor in YouTube SEO and influence visibility in search results.Keep titles around 45–50 characters; you can use up to 100. Include action words and curiosity-inducing phrases.Use Tags to Help RankingContrary to meta tag advice in web SEO, using tags on YouTube is important to rank higher. Tags help define and recommend videos, making them a solid source of channel traffic.YouTube allows up to 120 characters for tags. Include a variety of your target keywords.Write Descriptions That Aid RankingThe description field is crucial for both users and YouTube SEO. Clearly explain the video topic and include your target keywords.You have up to 5,000 characters—use this to include keywords you couldn’t fit in the title.Think of descriptions like meta descriptions: they persuade viewers to watch. Include CTAs and links to your website if applicable, and use timestamp links to highlight key sections. You can also add up to 15 hashtags, but avoid overdoing it.Optimize Your Video File NameYouTube SEO isn’t only about in-platform optimizations. Before uploading, rename your video file to include keywords—e.g., use “youtube-seo-tips.mov” instead of “VID_1234.mov.” This gives the algorithm an early hint about your content.Use Transcripts and CaptionsAlgorithms can’t “watch” videos, but they can read text. Adding transcripts and captions helps your content get indexed and boosts ranking.Transcripts convert spoken content to text; you can generate them manually or via tools. Include timestamps so viewers can follow easily.Create Custom ThumbnailsThumbnails significantly improve click-through rates. In search results, the thumbnail, title, and description are what convince users to watch your video.Choose images that illustrate your topic and overlay text. OCR technology helps YouTube and Google understand the text in your thumbnails.Use End Screens and CardsIf you want viewers to take an action, use YouTube cards and end screens. You can verbally suggest other videos, but cards keep viewers on your channel longer.Cards are visual notifications appearing in the top right—up to 5 per video—to drive clicks to other videos or links. End screens appear at the end to prompt subscribers, video views, or website visits.Professional YouTube SEO TipsHere are advanced tips to help algorithms favor your videos: Keep videos at least 2 minutes long; top-ranked videos average over 10 minutes, Always include your focus keyword in the title, Write compelling first lines in descriptions, Use thumbnails that grab attention, Encourage comments on your videos, Share video links outside YouTube—blogs, email, forums, your website, and social media to drive more traffic. Monitor Your YouTube Analytics ContinuouslyYouTube analytics are key to shaping your SEO strategy. Identify what's working and what isn't.Must-watch metrics for YouTube SEO include: Watch Time: Total minutes viewers spend watching your content, Impression Click-Through Rate: Percentage of impressions on YouTube home/search pages that turned into views, Card Click-Through Rate: Rate at which viewers click your cards, Traffic Sources: Tracks where your viewers come from, Unique Viewers: Estimated number of distinct viewers over a period, Subscriber Growth: Monitors changes in your subscriber count. Tools to Strengthen Your YouTube SEO StrategyUse these tools to enhance your YouTube SEO: Canva: Design channel logos, cards, and thumbnails to boost CTR. VidIQ: A Chrome extension to analyze any channel or video’s tags, watch time, and strategy. TubeBuddy: Helps manage your channel and offers SEO insights like tag suggestions and rank tracking. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer: Delivers keyword, tag, and content ideas to power your SEO. ConclusionIn SEO, the longer users stay on a site, the more valuable it is in the eyes of algorithms—and the same holds true for YouTube.The longer you keep viewers on your channel, the more the algorithm notices.You don’t need expensive equipment or high-end production to rank on YouTube. Focus on creating engaging videos that genuinely help viewers.Use the YouTube SEO tips and recommendations in this guide to strengthen your strategy—after all, platforms like Google and YouTube always prioritize great user experience.