Dead clicks

A dead click is a click on something that looks clickable but does nothing. A styled box that was never wired up, a disabled button that gives no feedback, an icon that ignores the tap. The visitor expected a response and got silence.

Where a rage click is the visitor reacting in frustration, a dead click is the quieter signal that comes first: one hopeful tap on something that lied about being interactive.

How detection works

Clickport only counts a dead click when two things are both true. First, the clicked element (or a close parent) actually looks interactive: a link, a button, or anything with a pointer cursor. Second, within about seven tenths of a second nothing on the page responds: no navigation, no change to the page, no scroll.

If anything reacts, it is not a dead click. Working links and form fields are never flagged, because they do exactly what a click should do. This keeps the signal honest: a dead click means something genuinely failed to respond.

• Runs in the browser. The detection happens inside the tracker. Only the resulting signal is sent, never the raw click stream.
• Capped per page. Dead clicks are limited to a handful per page visit.

What is captured

For each dead click Clickport keeps only a short element selector (its tag, plus an id, a class or two, and a role when present) and the element's visible label when it has one. Nothing else.

There are no click coordinates, no screen recording, no mouse paths, no keystrokes, and nothing about who the visitor is. It is cookieless and carries no personal data. Selectors that look like they could carry personal data are dropped.

The sub-items: which elements go nowhere

In the Signals breakdown, expand the Dead clicks row to see the exact element selectors that visitors clicked and got nothing back, ranked by how many visitors hit each one.

How to act on dead clicks

A dead click usually points at one of these:

• A placeholder element. A card, badge, or icon styled to look interactive that was never wired to anything. Either make it do something or make it look inert.
• A disabled button with no feedback. The control is intentionally off, but the visitor cannot tell why. Add a tooltip or explanatory text so the dead state is obvious.
• JavaScript that failed to bind. The handler should be there but never attached, often because a script error broke earlier in the page. Check for errors on the same page.

Dead clicks are an early-warning signal. They tend to show up before rage clicks, because a patient visitor taps once, gets nothing, and moves on rather than hammering. Fixing them removes friction your funnel never reports as a hard failure.

Where it shows up

Dead clicks carry an amber D badge. They appear on the individual session page lines in the Sessions sub-tabs, and inside a session they sit in the timeline next to pageviews, scrolls, and clicks.

Good to know

• Forward-only. Dead clicks exist for visits that happen after the feature is active on your site. Past sessions cannot be backfilled.
• Single-page apps are covered. A dead tap is tied to the right route even after a client-side navigation.
• It does not use your pageview allowance. Dead clicks are events and do not count toward your monthly pageview limit.

For the deep dive on how rage and dead clicks compare, and the privacy reasoning behind both, see Frustration Signals and the article Rage clicks and dead clicks.