Microsoft launches its Clarity web analytics tool for A/B testing and visualizing user sessions

To help webmasters understand how visitors interact with their sites, Microsoft has launched its new Clarity analytics tool in beta today.

Set to rival the likes of Optimizely, Google Optimize and Visual Web Optimizer, Clarity lets you run A/B tests, and play back visualizations of users’ experiences and behavior patterns on your site. The tool should not only help you understand what your visitors see, but also debug errors and spot usability issues.

The company says that reviewing Clarity sessions helped it discover that some folks who were having trouble with Bing were in fact using browsers infected with malware:

Clarity is still in the works, so it’ll likely need to add more features before it can compete with other services. To that end, the team plans to use AI to help discover notable user sessions that show abnormal click behavior and JavaScript errors, and also offer up heatmaps to show you how users click and scroll around on your pages.

Microsoft says the tool will work with any HTML webpage using the most common two- and three-letter top-level domains; support for other TLDs is on the way.

You can sign up to try the beta by joining the waitlist with a Microsoft account. Let us know which site optimization tool you prefer in the comments.