Dead clicks are broken promises. Rage clicks show intent turning into frustration. Measuring them makes optimisation more concrete.
When we watch a website user session recording, we realise the important stuff can be quite small.
A visitor clicks something that looks clickable. Nothing happens. They click again. Still nothing. Then they click three times in quick succession, like they are trying to wake the page up.
That’s called a ‘dead click’. Its louder cousin is called the ‘rage click’.
Dead clicks are clicks on elements that do not respond. Rage clicks are bursts of repeated clicks in the same spot – usually a sign the user expected an action and hit a wall. Both are a sign of confusion, frustration, or broken assumptions.
In B2B, we should care. People do not rage click on a page they do not care about. They rage click when they are trying to do something and our design is in the way.
The good news is that this is measurable, and we do not need to guess.
Microsoft Clarity is often recommended because it gives us session recordings and heatmaps, and it will also flag frustration signals like rage clicks. Recording these is the quickest route to “here is the exact place people are getting annoyed”.
Look for repeated patterns. One user rage clicking can be a weird edge case. Ten users doing it in the same spot is a design flaw.
Text that looks like a link should be a link, or it should stop looking like one. Icons that look tappable should do something, or they should not be there. Images that invite clicking should either open, zoom, or explain what happens next.
Sometimes the click is not dead, it is slow. If a form submission takes time, show progress. If a button triggers a background action, confirm it. Silence makes people click again.
The point is not to obsess over every click. It is to remove the moments where motivated visitors feel ignored.