The same approach can be applied to ecommerce sites with an “add to cart” feature.
You can easily review customers who added a product to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase by filtering for users who visited one page but didn’t reach the next.
See the example below:
Building custom events with GTM
Prebuilt filters are great, but they are limited. There are many instances where you will want to track specific items and actions on your site that are not available out of the box.
Google Tag Manager (GTM) allows you to tag and track a wide variety of events. We can then send these events into Clarity as “smart events” and use them to build custom segments.
This feature allows you to create any event in GTM, send it to Clarity, segment session recordings and gain deeper insights.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to setting this up. (In this example, we’ll track affiliate link clicks, but the process can be applied to any type of tracking.)
Step 1: First, define the question to plan the events you need to track.
In this case, I want to gain a deeper understanding of users clicking on affiliate links and how they interact with website articles before clicking out.
To do this, I need to create an event every time a user clicks on a link to the affiliate target.
Step 2: Connect Clarity and GTM by navigating to Settings > { } Setup.
Step 3: Create the GTM tag within your GTM account. Navigate to Tags > New.
Click to add a new tag type. In the sidebar, you’ll find premade tags for Microsoft Clarity.
I added the “luratic” tag, but any of the Clarity tags should work OK.
Step 4: Configure the tag by adding the Clarity project ID, which can be found under Settings > Overview.
See the orange box in the screenshot below. This tells GTM to push the event into your Clarity account (when triggered).
Add the project ID to the GTM tag configuration, as shown in the first red box.
Under Advanced Options, tick Add Custom Events, then add the event name (see the orange box above).
This event will be created by GTM and sent to Clarity. Choose a descriptive name for it.
Step 5: Add the trigger, which is the action on the website that will initiate this tag to fire.
Click on the Trigger Configuration box to select a trigger option.
In my case, I selected a trigger for “Click – Just Links.” This fires when someone clicks a specific link.
Next, define the conditions. You could enter any text in the URL of a third-party website you’re sending traffic to.
In this example, I want the trigger to activate only when the URL contains the text “bym-windsor.”
Now, whenever someone clicks a link with “bym-windsor” in the URL, this tag will fire and generate the event.
Note that there are many different options for triggers that are worth exploring. Triggers can include elements clicked on the page or pages on a website loading or many other options.
Step 6: Save the tag and publish the GTM container by clicking the Publish button on the top right.
Step 7: You now want to find your new events inside Clarity.
I recommend manually triggering this event by clicking on it on your website and waiting 24 hours to give enough time for this data to be pushed through.
Open Clarity and navigate to Settings > Smart Events. Here, you should see your new event from GTM come through as an API event automatically.
You now have a new smart event, which you can use to build a segment.
Step 7: Create the segment. In Clarity, open your filters and navigate to User actions > Smart events.
Select the event you have generated in GTM.
Step 8: The goal is to deepen your understanding of this particular group of users.
Over time, you can refine this segment further, drilling down into more specific categories.
Perhaps you want to determine whether they originated from a Meta campaign, whether they are nighttime visitors and whether they use mobile or desktop devices.
Transform your website analytics with Microsoft Clarity
It’s not often you come across a gem like Microsoft Clarity. It will help you paint a colorful picture and better understand your users.
The key to Clarity is in your approach. Start with the right questions, build custom events, use segments and gain deeper insights.
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