Microsoft Clarity flagged 73% of my client's button clicks as "dead." Almost none were.
Audited a client this week (Shopify). Clarity reported thousands of dead clicks.
My team spent an afternoon clicking every flagged element and almost all of them were fine.
What Clarity was missing:
- Variant pickers tap a color, price refetches from Shopify's API takes about 1.2 seconds. Clarity sees no immediate DOM mutation, calls it dead destroying the report
- Lazy loaded images: tap to expand, fetch starts. Same story.
- Preorder check buttons: fires an inventory check, waits 2 seconds but Clarity already stopped measuringg
- Short animations: fadein confirmations under 300ms are below the threshold.
I love Clarity, but the model is so outdated... click --> instant DOM change = real click; otherwise = dead. That worked in 2015. In 2025 every modern eComm site does an async after the click and variant fetches, optimistic UI, skeleton loaders, modals that animate in. Clarity flags all of it as dead which is crazy they haven't updated it.
Instead of just watching the DOM, we started watching what else happens around the click. If the right downstream signal fired in the right window, the click wasn't dead, just deferred.
Same 7 day window, same site:
| Clarity | Us | |
|---|---|---|
| Dead clicks reported | about 2400 | 651 |
| Estimated false positive rate | 3 out of 4 | dominant FP classes filtered |
| Actionable issues surfaced | (heatmap only) | 12 |
Don't get me wrong, I like Clarity and it has its uses and it's free, and the heatmaps are still great for raw exploration. Just a heads up if you've been acting on its dead click data and finding it doesn't match what your users actually say.
