Website Designer in Pune: How to Use Free Heatmaps and Session Recordings (Microsoft Clarity) to See Why Visitors Do Not Enquire

Website Designer in Pune: How to Use Free Heatmaps and Session Recordings (Microsoft Clarity) to See Why Visitors Do Not Enquire

You can find out why visitors leave your service website without enquiring by installing a free behaviour-analytics tool such as Microsoft Clarity, which records anonymised visits and draws heatmaps of where people click and how far they scroll. A website designer in Pune can set it up in under an hour, but the real value comes from what you do afterwards: watching a small, focused sample of visits, writing down the specific friction you see, fixing one thing at a time, and checking again. Microsoft states that Clarity is "a free service forever", so the cost is attention, not rupees.

This guide is written for the owner of a clinic, coaching class, manufacturing unit, interior design studio, school or NGO who has a website that gets visitors but few phone calls or form submissions, and who has been told to "improve the design" without being told what is actually wrong. We explain what the tool shows, what it cannot show, how to set it up safely with masking and consent, how to run a one-week review, and how to turn what you see into changes a designer can build. We have kept the claims modest. Behaviour tools reveal friction; they do not guarantee more enquiries, and we do not quote conversion lifts because no honest figure applies to your site before you measure it.

What Clarity Actually Gives You

Google Analytics tells you how many people arrived, from where, and which pages they viewed. It is much weaker at telling you what a visitor did on the page. Behaviour tools fill that gap. According to Microsoft's own documentation, Clarity offers session recordings ("watch how users navigate your site"), heatmaps that "visualize clicks, scrolling, attention, and conversions", a dashboard, filters and segments, funnels and smart events, and AI-generated summaries called Copilot. Newer sections also cover bot activity and AI citations, plus a mobile SDK for Android, iOS, Flutter and React Native apps.

For a small-business website, three of these matter most.

Session recordings replay an anonymised visit: the cursor movement, scrolling, taps and page changes. They are the closest thing to standing behind a visitor's shoulder, and they are where most useful discoveries come from.

Heatmaps aggregate many visits onto one page. A click map shows where people click or tap, including on things that are not links. A scroll map shows how far down the page visitors get. Both are useful for deciding what belongs above the fold on a long service page.

Filters and smart events let you narrow recordings to the visits that matter, such as mobile visitors who reached the contact page and left without submitting. Without filters you will drown in recordings of visitors who bounced in two seconds.

What it cannot tell you

Be clear about the limits before you start, because they decide how much weight a finding deserves.

• It cannot tell you why someone left. It shows what they did before leaving; you infer the reason, and you can be wrong.
• It does not replace conversation. A short call with three recent enquirers and three people who did not convert will teach you things no recording can.
• A handful of recordings is a prompt for a hypothesis, not proof. If you see one visitor struggle with your menu, that is a clue. If you see eight of twelve mobile visitors do the same thing, that is a pattern.
• It does not measure offline outcomes. A visitor who called after reading your page is invisible unless you track calls separately. Our article on how to design a service page that produces enquiries covers what to put on the page; this guide is about checking whether it works.

Before You Install: Decide What You Are Trying to Learn

A common mistake is to install the tool and "see what happens". You will then watch recordings aimlessly and find nothing. Instead, write one question before you begin. Good questions for a service business look like this:

• Why do people visit the contact page but not submit the form?
• Do mobile visitors find the phone number, or do they scroll past it?
• Does anyone read the pricing section, or do they leave before it?
• Are visitors from our Google Ads landing page behaving differently from organic visitors?
• Do people click on things that are not clickable, such as a photo of a team member or a heading that looks like a button?

Pick one, and keep a plain document with the question at the top. Everything you watch is then evidence for or against a specific suspicion rather than general entertainment.

Step 1: Install Clarity on Your Site

Microsoft's documented setup is: sign up, install the tracking code, verify the installation, and start exploring. The tracking code is a small script. How you add it depends on the platform.

WordPress

Many WordPress sites add Clarity through the official plugin or by pasting the script into the header using a header-and-footer plugin or a tag manager. If your site already uses Google Tag Manager, adding Clarity as a tag there keeps all third-party scripts in one place and makes removal easy. If you are not sure what scripts your site already loads, read our guide on auditing third-party scripts and tag manager containers first; adding another script to a site that already runs six is a decision, not a formality.

Custom-built and React sites

On a custom site, the script goes in the base HTML template, or is loaded after the page has become interactive so it does not compete with your main content. On single-page applications, check that page changes are recorded as separate pages, because a site that never reloads can appear to Clarity as one long visit unless route changes are tracked. Ask your developer to confirm this in the verification step.

Verify before you rely on it

After installing, open your own site in a browser, click around, then look in the Clarity dashboard for your visit. Use the "Clarity Live" extension or the live recordings view if available. Do not assume it works because the install screen said so. Also add your own office IP address to the exclusion list, which Microsoft documents as "IP exclusion", so your staff browsing the site do not pollute the recordings.

A note on page speed

Any added script has a cost. Clarity is designed to be light, but "light" is not "free of impact", and we have no measurement of its effect on your site. After installing it, run your key pages through PageSpeed Insights or look at your Core Web Vitals report, and compare against how the site performed before. Our guide to Interaction to Next Paint explains why extra scripts can make a page feel slower to respond even when it looks loaded. If the tool is slowing a money page, you can run it on selected pages only or remove it after your review period.

Step 2: Protect Visitor Privacy With Masking

This is the step most small sites skip, and it is the one that matters most if your website collects names, phone numbers, health details, donation information or anything else personal.

Microsoft documents that Clarity "masks sensitive content on your website by default" and "never captures anything that is masked or sent over the wire". There are three masking modes: Strict, where all content is masked; Balanced, the default, where "only sensitive content is masked" and numbers and email addresses are classified as sensitive; and Relaxed, where no page content is masked. Microsoft also states that content in input boxes and drop-down menus is masked in all modes and cannot be customised.

That default is a sensible start, but do not stop there. Consider these decisions.

Choose the mode on purpose. If your site shows patient names, student results, donor lists or anything personal on pages (not just in forms), use Strict mode, or mask those specific elements. Strict mode makes recordings less readable, but you can still see layout, cursor movement and scrolling, which is usually enough to find usability problems.

Mask by element. In Settings, Masking, you can enter CSS selectors for elements to mask or unmask. You can also add the attribute data-clarity-mask="True" to any HTML element so that element and its children are masked. Microsoft notes that changes affect new recordings only and can take up to an hour to apply, and that only project administrators can change masking.

Do not put sensitive text in places the tool does not mask. Microsoft's documentation warns that Clarity does not mask content within style sheets or style tags, and recommends not hosting sensitive content within CSS. This is an unusual case, but a good example of why a developer should review your install.

Do not run it on sensitive sections without thought. If you run a donation checkout, a patient portal or a student login, ask whether recordings of those pages are needed at all. In most cases, you can exclude them. Microsoft also says Clarity "shouldn't be used on websites or apps that target users under 18 years of age", which matters for schools, tuition classes and any youth-focused organisation. If your audience is mainly under 18, do not install it.

Step 3: Consent, Cookies and the DPDP Act

Visitors should be told what you collect. For an Indian website, the relevant law is the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. The practical reading for a small business is covered in our article on DPDP Act website compliance; treat what follows as general information, not legal advice, and take advice from a qualified professional on your obligations.

On the technical side, Microsoft documents a consent mechanism. Starting 31 October 2025, Clarity enforces consent signals for visits from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. The documented consent call passes two values, ad_Storage and analytics_Storage, each "granted" or "denied". If consent is not granted, Clarity assigns a unique ID per page view and does not use cookies to persist session data; it runs in what Microsoft calls no-consent mode with limited tracking. If a visitor rejects cookies, Clarity deletes any existing cookie for the site, ends the current session and restarts in no-consent mode.

Microsoft's page names the EEA, UK and Switzerland. It does not describe an Indian requirement, so do not read it as one. What it does show is how a well-designed consent flow behaves, and a good habit to copy: the tool should respect the visitor's choice, and your cookie banner should actually control it rather than decorate the page.

Practical steps for an Indian business:

1. Add Clarity to your privacy policy: say you use a behaviour-analytics tool, what it records in general terms, that content is masked, and how to contact you.
2. If you run a cookie banner, connect it to the tool so that declining analytics cookies actually changes what is loaded.
3. Avoid recording pages where people enter personal or health information.
4. Set a data retention view and delete sessions you no longer need if the tool offers that setting for your project.

Our guide to cookie banners, popups and mobile SEO explains how to avoid a banner that blocks content or hurts usability, which matters here because a clumsy banner is one of the first things you may notice in recordings.

Step 4: A One-Week Review Plan

Install the tool, then leave it alone for several days to collect enough visits. How many is "enough" depends on your traffic, and we cannot give an honest number for your site. A site with a few hundred visits a month will have fewer recordings to learn from than one with several thousand, and that limits what you can conclude. Our article on A/B testing a landing page with low traffic explains why small samples call for bigger, bolder changes and for qualitative evidence rather than statistical tests, and the same reasoning applies here.

Once you have a reasonable set of recordings, follow this routine.

Day 1: Look at the dashboard

Check the overall pattern: popular pages, device split, and the share of visits from each source. Microsoft's documentation describes the dashboard as offering trends, content performance and performance metrics in one place. Use it to choose where to look, not as the answer. If 80 percent of your visitors are on mobile, your review should be mobile-first.

Day 2: Heatmaps on three pages

Pick the home page, your main service page and the contact page. Look at the click map and the scroll map for mobile and desktop separately.

• Dead clicks. Are people tapping things that do nothing, such as an image, an icon or a heading? That usually means the design suggests something is clickable when it is not.
• Ignored buttons. Is the main call-to-action getting few clicks compared with the menu or the logo?
• Scroll drop-off. Where does the scroll map go cold? If most visitors never reach your pricing, process or testimonial section, the section may be in the wrong place or the page may be too long before the valuable part.
• Phone number behaviour. On mobile, do people tap the number? If not, is it tappable, and is it visible without scrolling?

Days 3 to 5: Watch recordings with a filter

Filter to mobile visits on the contact page or on pages that precede it, and watch roughly a dozen. Take notes in a table: page, device, what the visitor did, where they stopped, and your guess about why. Do not jump to solutions while watching.

Look for specifics, not feelings.

• Does the visitor start the form and abandon it? Which field were they on?
• Do they scroll back and forth looking for information, such as your address, fees or timings?
• Do they open the menu and close it without choosing anything?
• Do they tap a button repeatedly and nothing happens?
• Do they zoom in on text that is too small?
• Do they hit a popup or banner that covers the content?

Day 6: Group the findings

Sort your notes into themes and count how many recordings show each. Rank them by how directly they sit between the visitor and an enquiry. A broken submit button outranks an unclear heading, and an unclear heading outranks a font preference.

Day 7: Pick three changes

Choose no more than three. Changing too much at once makes it impossible to know what helped. Write each as a testable statement: "Move the enquiry form above the testimonials on mobile, because 7 of 12 recordings never scrolled to it."

What the Patterns Usually Mean

These are common patterns and plausible fixes. They are hypotheses to test on your own site, not guaranteed causes.

Our article on contact form spam and bot protection is worth reading before you change a form, because adding protection such as CAPTCHAs can itself be the friction you see in recordings.

A Worked Example (An Illustration, Not a Client Result)

Imagine a physiotherapy clinic in Kothrud with a six-page site. The owner says the site gets visits but few appointment requests. The question written on day one is: "Do mobile visitors find the appointment form?"

The clinic installs Clarity, sets Strict masking because the booking form collects health-related details, and excludes the office IP. After a week, the owner reviews a dozen mobile recordings of visitors who reached the services page. In an imagined outcome, several of them scroll past a long block of text about the clinic's history, reach the bottom, then go back to the top and open the menu. The appointment form sits two screens below the history section. The click map shows taps on the clinic's photo, which is not a link.

The imagined hypotheses: the appointment option is too far down, and the photo looks like it should lead somewhere. The three changes: add a "Book an appointment" button near the top of the services page that jumps to the form, make the photo non-interactive by changing its styling, and shorten the history section. The owner then watches another dozen recordings the following fortnight, and compares the share of visitors who reach the form. We have no outcome figure to give, because this is an illustration; the point is the method of writing down a question, finding a pattern, and changing a small number of things.

What to Ask a Website Designer in Pune

If you are hiring a website designer in Pune, or asking your current agency to do this, these questions separate a careful engagement from a box-ticking one:

1. Which masking mode will you use, and why, for our kind of site?
2. Will the tool be connected to our cookie banner, and how will you test that declining analytics actually works?
3. Which pages will be excluded from recording?
4. How will you confirm that the script does not slow down our key pages?
5. What question are we trying to answer, and when will we review the result?
6. Who owns the Clarity project account, and will you transfer it to us at the end?
7. How will changes be recorded so we can compare before and after?

The last two matter more than they seem. As with any tool installed by an agency, the account should sit under your own login, with the agency added as a member, so that it stays with you if you change agencies. Our handover and ownership checklist lists the other accounts worth checking.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Microsoft Clarity really free?

Microsoft's documentation states that Clarity "is a free service forever" with no obligation to upgrade to a paid version. You may still pay a designer or developer for setup, masking review and acting on the findings, and your own time to watch recordings is a real cost.

Is it safe to use heatmaps and session recordings on a website that collects personal data?

It can be, if configured carefully. Clarity masks sensitive content by default and always masks input boxes and drop-downs, and you can mask specific elements or use Strict mode. You should also avoid recording sensitive pages, update your privacy notice, and take professional advice on your obligations under the DPDP Act. Microsoft says it should not be used on sites or apps that target users under 18.

How many visitors do I need before heatmaps are useful?

There is no single number. With low traffic you will have few recordings, so treat what you see as clues to investigate rather than proof. Watching a dozen focused recordings on one page often shows a pattern, but if every visit looks different, collect more before changing anything.

Will Clarity slow my website down?

Any added script has a cost, and we have not measured Clarity's effect on your site. Test your key pages before and after installing it using PageSpeed Insights or your Core Web Vitals report, and remove it from pages where the cost is not justified.

Can I use Google Analytics and Clarity together?

Yes, they answer different questions. Google Analytics shows how many people came and from where; a behaviour tool shows what they did on the page. Microsoft also documents integrations with supported platforms, so check the current list in its documentation.

Sources

• Microsoft Learn, "Clarity Overview": the feature list (session recordings, heatmaps, filters, funnels, Copilot, mobile SDK), the statement that Clarity is a free service forever, and the guidance that it should not be used on sites or apps targeting users under 18.
• Microsoft Learn, "Masking content": the three masking modes, default Balanced mode, always-masked inputs and drop-downs, mask by element, the data-clarity-mask attribute, the one-hour delay, administrator-only changes and the style-sheet caveat.
• Microsoft Learn, "Clarity Cookie Consent API, ConsentV2": enforcement from 31 October 2025 for the EEA, UK and Switzerland, the ad_Storage and analytics_Storage values, and behaviour in no-consent mode.
• The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, for the general consent point; this article is not legal advice.
• The clinic example is an illustration created for this article, not a client result. We cite no conversion or speed figures because we have not measured any that would apply to your site.

About the author and next step

This guide was written by the web design team at Govindani Infotech, a website design and development company at 2nd Floor, Landmark Plaza, 206 Satara Road, Parvati Paytha, Pune 411009. If you would like a second pair of eyes on why your site gets visits but few enquiries, see our website creation service, our lead generation service for paid traffic, or contact us on 092019 58274. Scope and pricing are confirmed by the team after reviewing your site.