Most of what a click map shows you is reassuring: people click the things you hoped they would click. Two patterns in it are more useful than that, because each one points at a specific element and tells you something is wrong with it.
They are quick to spot and usually quick to fix.
Dead clicks
A dead click is a tap on something that is not interactive. The visitor thought it was. That gap between what your page looks like it does and what it actually does is the finding, and it is almost always a styling accident nobody decided on.
Three common sources of dead clicks on a web page: a heading styled in the same colour as links, a product image people expect to enlarge, and a panel that reads as a button without being one.
The fix is usually one of two things. Either make it do what people expect — link the heading, let the image open, make the price card clickable — or restyle it so it stops looking interactive. Both are small changes, and the first is often the better one, because the visitors were showing you a route they wanted.
Better still, dead clicks cluster. They collect on a few elements instead of spreading evenly across the page, which makes this one of the few analytics findings that arrives as a short list.
Rage clicks
A rage click is three or more taps in the same spot inside eight tenths of a second — that is the window our collector actually uses. The name sounds dramatic; the cause is usually mild. Someone pressed a button, nothing visibly happened, so they pressed it again.
A timeline of a rage click. The visitor clicks a button at zero seconds, nothing changes on screen, they click again at 0.3 seconds and again at 0.6 seconds, and the page finally responds at 2.1 seconds.
So the fix is often not in the handler at all. A spinner, a disabled state, a label that changes to "Sending…" — any sign that the press registered — removes the behaviour entirely. Our own signup button does this, and it is the cheapest reassurance on a form.
When it is a bug, this is the fastest way to find it. A rage cluster on one element in one browser is a far better bug report than "the page doesn't work for some people", and it comes with the element already named.
Where to start
- Open a click map for a page that matters: checkout, signup, pricing.
- Sort by dead clicks and look at the top two elements only. Fix those.
- Check whether any rage clusters share an element. If one does, press that button yourself on a slow connection and watch what the page says while it thinks.
- Come back in a fortnight. Both counts should have fallen, and that is a rare case of an analytics change you can actually verify.
Both are recorded by the same script as everything else — there is nothing extra to install and no second quota. Click, scroll and attention maps are included from Growth. If you want the wider picture first, how to read a heatmap covers all three map types and what each is good at.