Let your customers show you what works, don't just ask them
Here’s a belief that sits underneath everything I do: the customer is the only judge that matters. Not me, not you, not your mate who “knows about websites”. The person trying to use your site to book a table or get a quote: they decide whether it works.
The trouble is, if you ask that person what’s wrong, they’ll often give you the wrong answer. Not because they’re lying. Because people are genuinely unreliable narrators of their own behaviour.
Why asking doesn’t work
There’s a well-worn gap between what people say they do and what they actually do. Ask someone in a survey and they’ll tell you they read carefully, they’d happily fill in a form, the menu was easy to find. Then watch them and they skim, they bail at the first whiff of effort, and they never even saw the menu button.
It’s not dishonesty. We’re just bad at observing ourselves. We rationalise after the fact, we forget the fiddly bits, and we tell you what we think you want to hear. So feedback collected by asking is shaky ground to make decisions on.
The fix isn’t to ask harder. It’s to stop asking and start watching, properly, anonymously, at scale.
Watch what they actually do
This is where a free tool called Microsoft Clarity comes in, and it’s a big part of how I work.
Clarity quietly records how people use your site and shows it back to you two ways:
- Session recordings: anonymised playbacks of real visits, so you can watch where people go, what they tap, and where they give up.
- Heatmaps: a coloured overlay showing where people click and how far down the page they scroll, pooled across everyone.
Instead of guessing, you get to sit behind the customer’s shoulder and watch, without anyone knowing or being identified.
The things it surfaces
Clarity is good at catching specific, fixable problems that no survey would ever reveal:
- Rage clicks: when someone clicks the same spot over and over, fast and frustrated, usually because they think something’s a button and it isn’t.
- Dead clicks: taps on things that look clickable but do nothing.
- Where people scroll to before giving up: the exact point on the page where you lose them.
Let me make those concrete with a couple of illustrative examples. Say a café in Torquay has its phone number printed on the page as plain text. On a phone, people expect to tap a number and have it dial. Clarity might show dozens of frustrated taps on that number (rage clicks) because it was never set up as tap-to-call. Easy fix, once you can see it.
Or imagine a tradie whose quote button sits right at the bottom of a long page. The scroll data might show almost everyone dropping off two-thirds of the way down. They never reach the button. You’d never guess that from asking. The recording makes it obvious.
These aren’t opinions or hunches. They’re evidence of real behaviour, and evidence is something you can act on with confidence.
An honest word on privacy
Whenever you mention “recording how people use a site”, the fair next question is: is this creepy? It’s a question worth taking seriously, so here’s the straight answer.
Clarity is privacy-first by design. It masks text and personal information by default, so things people type, like names, emails or card details, aren’t captured. It’s anonymised: you’re watching behaviour, not individuals. There’s no name attached, no profile being built on someone, nothing for sale. It’s also widely used and built to be GDPR-friendly, which is the strict European privacy standard.
In plain terms: it shows me that “someone struggled to find the booking button”, not “who” that someone was. That’s the line, and it stays well on the right side of it. No creepy personal tracking.
How this shapes the retainer
This philosophy is the reason my retainer is built the way it is. One of the things the $600-a-month retainer covers is fixes based on how real customers use the site, and this is the engine behind that promise.
Each month I look at what people actually did: where they rage-clicked, where they dropped off, what they never found. Then I make evidence-based fixes (make that phone number tap-to-call, move that booking button up, cut the step where everyone bails) and your monthly report tells you, in plain English, what I changed and why.
It’s the opposite of “we built it, good luck”. The site keeps getting better because your customers keep showing us how, whether they realise it or not.
If you’d like to see what your visitors are really doing, and have someone act on it, grab a free rebuild preview or book a 15-minute chat. I’m always happy to explain how any of this works, no jargon, no pitch.