As a website owner, what could be worse than having a visitor leave your site because of the frustration that you can control? Wouldn’t it be great to have a clean user experience across your website such that there are more conversions and fewer bounce rates?
Visitors’ on your website can get frustrated because of various things. One such frustration could be repeatedly clicking on a section or any control of the website and expecting something to happen. This behavior in VWO is what we call Rage and Dead Clicks.
Consider a situation where you are trying to power off your mobile device by pressing the power button, but your device is still on. As a result, you start pressing the power button repeatedly out of frustration to achieve your end goal. This is a typical example of rage.
The frustration is generated at the point where the visitor first clicks. The struggle simply represents a series of rage clicks or dead clicks just a little bit after. It also might happen that a dead click may be followed by a series of rage-dead clicks on the element, which only goes on to prove the confusion or vice-versa. What needs to be studied is not the sequence of Rage Clicks or Dead Clicks, but the series of events that happened right before it - as the root cause of why the rage clicking occurred in the first place.
Analyzing Rage and Dead Clicks helps you to fix the following on your webpage:
- Bugs
- Usability issues
- Latency issues
What are Rage Clicks?
Rage clicks typically represent a frustration where the website visitor does not see an event that is expected to happen on a click. Here, a visitor tries to click again, and still, nothing happens. This might be that the website doesn't function or doesn’t do what it's supposed to do, or it's just doing it slowly.
After a few attempts, the visitor might get frustrated by the lack of response or the time taken for the page to respond and might rapid-fire clicks on the page. These clicks are not out of any expectation, but they are a form of reaction in that situation that most visitors expressed- either on desktop or mobile.
For example, if a trial sign-up form is supposed to appear when clicking on a button, but it does not show up or takes longer due to some technical issues. You click again and still, you do not see anything happening. Now, you get frustrated and rapid-fire click, click, click….click, and still, nothing happens. This typcially implies struggle and requires optimizing the visitor experience such that they can achieve their desired goal.
Not just this, there could be other situations too where the visitor might exhibit a similar behavior pattern. It is when a reaction is required but is not properly communicated, despite the click having done its job. For example, clicking on the ‘add to cart’ button may add the product to the cart, but the visitor is not notified that the product got successfully added to the cart. Here, the visitors might assume that the “add to cart” option is not working and may click the button repeatedly out of frustration. Once they finally check their cart, they find that the product has been added multiple times. In this scenario, a simple message or UI notification could have avoided this struggle altogether.
What are Dead Clicks?
The dead clicks occur when a non-clickable element is clicked. This typically means that the element clicked by the website visitor clicked is non-functional and is not designed to receive clicks. This may reflect a difference in expectations from what has been implemented on the website. A dead click occurs due to confusion or as a requirement that has an effect elsewhere.
Many a time, a simple text with an underline could be misinterpreted as a link (Does this text look like a link? Sure it does, but it is not!) or a text in a rectangular box may look like a Call To Action button and may receive clicks. Although the developers are confident that the texts in these scenarios are simple enough not to receive clicks but the way website visitors interpreted it was different. They might expect some additional information on the subject and thus out of curiosity clicked on the text. When nothing really happens, visitors can feel frustrated that they don't get something they're hoping for.
Dead clicks on the webpage may take the focus away from other elements. For example, if a child element has an internal scroll, the webpage may need to receive a click on the body to make the entire page scroll.
Like rage clicks, the dead clicks also represent some struggle to the visitor and bring in the scope for improving the website experience. Needless to say, if the user experience on your website is smooth, there would not be additional clicks that are not meant to happen.
In any of your VWO recordings, if you feel that clicks on a certain element are being wrongly classified as Dead Clicks, add these elements to the ignore list. To do this, go to SETTING > MORE > INSIGHTS SETTINGS, and select the in the IGNORE ELEMENTS FROM DEAD CLICK field, specify the CSS selector of any element. Using the +Add Element option, you can exclude multiple CSS selectors. Post this, any new clicks received on this element will no longer be shown as dead, but only as normal clicks.
Finding and analyzing Session Recordings with struggle behavior?
VWO lets you find and view the session recording that contains Rage Clicks. To find these recordings, go to INSIGHTS > SESSION RECORDINGS. While viewing the recordings that have Rage Clicks, you can discover various problem areas that your website visitors are facing and can fix what’s broken to deliver a smooth user experience. The STRUGGLE behavior is only available in VWO Enterprise and Pro plans.
Procedure
- Login to your VWO account.
- Go to INSIGHTS > Session Recordings.
- In the session recording dashboard, go to the All Visitors section to set the post segmentation.
- Go to the CUSTOM section and from the first dropdown, select BEHAVIOR > STRUGGLE.
The SESSION WITH and DEAD CLICKS option appears. - From the SESSIONS WITH dropdown, select the option you want to work with.
- From the DEAD CLICKS dropdown, select the option you want to work with.
- To add more conditions, click +Add condition.
- Once you are done configuring the segmentation conditions, click APPLY.
To verify if the segment conditions got applied successfully, check that all the sessions that appear must meet the conditions you have specified.
When you play such a session, the list of events displays the list of clicks that the visitor does during playback. Some might be classified as Rage or Dead clicks and are represented by these icons in the session. Either from the playback or from the list, you can figure out the element over which these clicks happen with the element text. For more details about any specific click, you can expand the event to show the CSS selector of the element.
These icons are also present at the visitor’s profile- to show the number of sessions where they have Rage or Dead clicked in. In the list of sessions, you can simply filter the visitor’s sessions to show only those with Rage or Dead clicks to quickly jump to sessions with that struggle behavior. The same icons appear in the sessions as well, so you can jump directly to the session even without filtering.