Windows 10: Bing introducing Clarity, a web analytics product for webmasters

Brink · Dec 12, 2018

Today, we are announcing the beta release of Clarity, a web analytics product which enables website developers to understand user behavior at scale.

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Web developers face many challenges in building compelling and user-friendly websites. Understanding why users struggle, where users run into issues or why they abandon a website is difficult. When making updates to a web experience, A/B experimentation helps developers decide on which way to go. While A/B experiments allow developers to see when their key metrics are moving, the primary drawback is the lack of visibility into why the metrics moved in any given direction. This gap in understanding user behavior led us to build Clarity.

Session Replay

The session replay capability of Clarity allows web developers to view a user's page impression to understand user interactions such as mouse movement, touch gestures, click events and much more. Being able to replay user sessions allows web developers to empathize with users and understand their pain points.

Clarity Case Studies

Bing uses Clarity to detect poor user experience due to malware

In the Wild West of devices and browsers, the experience you think you are serving and what your users see can be completely different - devices, plugin, proxies and networks can all change and degrade the quality of your experience. These problems are expensive to diagnose and fix.

The first image shows the page of Bing with malware while the second image shows Bing default experience after removal of malware.

Clarity has been used by the Bing UX team at Microsoft to delve into sessions that had negative customer satisfaction and determine what went wrong. In some cases, engineers were able to detect pages that had multiple overlays of advertisements and looked nothing like the expected experience for customers. Looking through the layout anomalies and network request logs that Clarity provides, Bing developers were able to diagnose the cause: malware installed on the end user's machine was hijacking the page and inserting bad content.

With the knowledge of what was causing these negative experiences, Bing engineers were able to design and implement changes which defended the Bing page. By doing so they increased revenue while decreasing page load time - all while giving their customers a significantly improved experience.

Cook with Manali uses Clarity to improve user engagement

Cook with Manali is a food blog and like many other blogs dedicated to cooking, posts begin with a story about the inspiration behind the recipe. Posts have detailed instructions to prepare the meal, high-quality photographs of the finished dish and potentially step by step pictures to help explain the more complicated parts. Near the bottom of the page is a shorthand recipe card summarizing ingredients, instructions and nutritional information. While this long post format enables food bloggers to emotionally connect with their readers and preemptively address any complication in the recipe, some readers would rather get straight to the recipe.

When the Cook with Manali team started using Clarity, they were able to investigate real user sessions and realized that almost thirty percent of users were abandoning the page before reaching the bottom of these recipe pages, which has important information about the recipe. In many cases, it seemed that users felt they had to scroll too far to get to the recipe that they really cared about and lost patience before making it far enough on the page. The developers realized their strategy was backfiring and creating a bad experience for some of their users, prompting them to add a "Jump to Recipe" button at the top of these pages.

With the new button deployed, the team was able to see traffic going up and abandonment going down. When they dug into these new session replays, they were able to see users utilizing the new button and getting directly to the content they cared about. They saw abandonment for these pages drop down to roughly ten percent, signaling a significant increase in user satisfaction. Interestingly, many users now utilize the "Jump to Recipe" button to then scroll back up to read the larger story afterwards.

How does Clarity work?

Clarity works on any HTML webpage (desktop or mobile) after adding a small piece of JavaScript to the website. This JavaScript code listens to browser events and instruments layout changes, network requests and user interactions. The instrumentation data is then uploaded and stored in the Clarity server running on Microsoft Azure.

Other capabilities coming soon

Interesting sessions are automatically bubbled up based on Clarity's AI and machine learning capabilities to help web developers review user sessions with abnormal click or scroll behavior, session length, JavaScript errors and more. Web developers can spend less time and gain more insight into their users focusing on the sessions that Clarity marks as most relevant.

Related sessions are a grouping of similar sessions that are recommended based a single session. This feature allows web developers to quickly understand the scope of a specific user behavior and find other occurrences for the same user as well as other users.

Heatmaps provide a view into user behavior at an aggregate level through click/touch and scroll heatmaps. Click/touch heatmap provides distribution of user interactions across a webpage. Scroll heatmaps provide how far users scroll on your webpage.

How do I get started?

Sign up at the Clarity website using your Microsoft Account! (In case you don’t have one, you can sign-up here.)

When you create a new project, it will be added to the waitlist. A notification will be sent when your project is approved for onboarding and you can login to Clarity to retrieve the uniquely generated JS code for your project. Once you have added the code to your website, you can use Clarity dashboard to start replaying user sessions and gain insights.

Please reach out to L: ClarityMS@microsoft.com if you have any questions.

Contributing to Clarity

The Clarity team has also open sourced the JavaScript library which instruments pages to help understand user behavior on websites on GitHub . As Clarity is in active development with continuous improvements, join our community and contribute. Getting started is easy, just visit GitHub and read through our README.

Here are some of the exciting new feature the Clarity team is brewing up:

Interesting sessions are automatically bubbled up based on Clarity's AI and machine learning capabilities to help web developers review user sessions with abnormal click or scroll behavior, session length, JavaScript errors and more. Web developers can spend less time and gain more insight into their users focusing on the sessions that Clarity marks as most relevant.

Related sessions are a grouping of similar sessions that are recommended based a single session. This feature allows web developers to quickly understand the scope of a specific user behavior and find other occurrences for the same user as well as other users.

Heatmaps provide a view into user behavior at an aggregate level through click/touch and scroll heatmaps. Click/touch heatmap provides distribution of user interactions across a webpage. Scroll heatmaps provide how far users scroll on your webpage.

Thank you,

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Source: Introducing Clarity, a web analytics product for webmasters | Webmaster Blog

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Brink · Dec 12, 2018

Introducing Social Login for Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing is actively listening to you, our customers, to improve our user experience and to understand what features you want within Bing Webmaster Tools. One of the top requests we have received is to expand the webmaster tools login capabilities to include a social login option.

We are excited to begin the first phase of the global roll out of social login to webmaster tools on Friday, February 9th to webmasters in the United States. We expect to continue the roll out to webmasters in Europe, Middle East and Africa, Latin America and Asia Pacific regions shortly thereafter. Webmasters will be able to login to Bing Webmaster Tools using their Facebook and Google accounts in addition to their existing Microsoft account.

Additionally, this means that the messages Webmaster Tools may occasionally send you about your managed properties will be sent to the email account associated with the webmaster tools account you are logged in with. The most recent messages will still be available in your Webmaster Tools Message Center.

If you don’t have a Webmaster Tools account, you can sign up today.

Let us know what you think of the new social login option. Tweet to us @Bing.

Thank you,

The Bing Webmaster Team
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Source: Introducing Social Login for Bing Webmaster Tools | Webmaster Blog

Brink · Dec 12, 2018

Introducing Bing AMP viewer and Bing AMP cache

In 2016, Bing joined the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP for short) open-source effort to help you “find” and “do” searches faster, regardless of where you are and on any device when you are looking for informaiton. Today, we are pleased to announce the release of Bing AMP viewer and Bing AMP Cache enabling AMP-enabled web pages to work directly from Bing’s mobile search results allowing Bing to provide faster mobile experiences to Bing users.

On Monday, the 17th we started the first phase of the global roll out of this AMP viewer and AMP carrousel in the United States for the news carrousel. We will continue the phased roll out to more web sites, more countries and regions and other links in the search results pages. Also, if you are in the United States, try it out on your mobile device by navigating to https://www.bing.com and search for news related queries and tapping the search results labelled with the AMP icon:

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Advice for AMP webmasters, AMP advertisers

The AMP protocol offers the ability to cache and serve cached copied AMP content that is published on the web, providing faster user experiences on Bing. In order to enable your AMP published content within Bing, you need to allow the Bingbot (our crawler) to fetch AMP content and allow cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) for bing-amp.com domain. Most AMP enabled sites and advertisers have already authorized the CORS sharing for the ampproject.org domain, but now need to also bing-amp.com to the allowed list.

Thank you,
Fabrice Canel
Principal Program Manager
Microsoft Bing
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Source: Introducing Bing AMP viewer and Bing AMP cache | Webmaster Blog

Brink · Dec 12, 2018

Intermittent Bing Webmaster Tools API Issues Resolved

The Bing Webmaster team recently received feedback that our APIs were intermittently failing, and we deeply regret any inconveniences caused from the API failures. We recognize the frustrations that this may have caused. Upon investigation, we discovered a technical glitch which led to API call failure that is now resolved. We are very grateful to you, our users, who brought this to our attention and thank you for your continued feedback and support.

We're Listening

Bing and Bing Webmaster Tools are actively listening to you and we value your feedback. It’s important to how we continually improve Bing and to help notify us of potential issues. It’s easy to provide feedback: just look for the Feedback button or link at the bottom of each page. It’s in the footer or the lower-right corner and it looks something like this:

We are using advances in technology to make it easier to quickly find what you are looking for – from answers to life's big questions or an item in an image you want to learn more about. At Bing, our goal is to help you get answers with less effort. We appreciate your feedback and the more that you can send, the more we can use it to improve Bing. Have a suggestion?

Tell us! The more feedback the merrier.

Please let us know.
The Bing Webmaster Tools Team
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Source: Intermittent Webmaster Tools API Issues Resolved | Webmaster Blog

Windows 10: Bing introducing Clarity, a web analytics product for webmasters

Bing introducing Clarity, a web analytics product for webmasters

Bing introducing Clarity, a web analytics product for webmasters

Bing introducing Clarity, a web analytics product for webmasters

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