TL;DR: Don't watch Clarity recordings in date order. Clean the pool first, filter to one page and one frustration signal, sort by clicks, and stop at 20. In our 100 most recent recordings, 72 had zero clicks, and 23 of the 27 zero-click sessions that entered on our quote page came from four returning visitor IDs.
The one-sentence answer: The value of session recordings comes from choosing which ones to open, so spend your first ten minutes on filters and the next thirty-five on twenty sessions that answer one question.
The first time we opened the recordings list for clickwerxs.com, the top of it was our quote page. Session after session entered on it, clicked nothing and never reached a second page. Several stayed for five or six minutes.
That looks like a broken page. It's the first thing you'd fix.
It wasn't broken. When we pulled the 100 most recent recordings (September 3 to 25, 2026), 31 had entered on the quote page and 27 of those never clicked anything. Then we checked the visitor IDs. 23 of the 27 came from just four Clarity user IDs: one seven times, two six times each, one four times. Whoever they are, they aren't 23 prospects abandoning a form.
A page that looked broken was mostly four repeat visitors. This guide is the selection method that surfaced that.
New to the tool? Start with what Microsoft Clarity is and what it costs.
Prerequisites
- Clarity installed and recording for at least two weeks. If you haven't installed it yet, start with our PageSpeed-safe install guide.
- One question you want answered. "Why don't people submit the quote form?" is a question. "Let's see what people do" is an afternoon gone.
- A page that matters. Pick the page where the action you care about happens, or the page right before it.
- 45 minutes and a notepad. Ten for filters, thirty-five for watching.
Step 1: Write the question down before you open anything
One page, one action, one sentence. Ours was: "What do visitors do on the quote page before they leave without submitting?"
The question decides every filter that follows. Without it you'll sort by newest and watch whatever comes up, which on our site means about a third of sessions under ten seconds and nearly three quarters with zero clicks.
If it fails: if you can't name the action, you don't yet know what the page is for. Open GA4, find the page with the most entrances and the fewest conversions, and make that your page.
Step 2: Clean the pool before you filter it
Every recordings list has noise that no frustration filter removes. Take it out first.
Your own team. Go to Settings, then IP blocking, and select Block IP address. There's a "Block my current IP" checkbox for the connection you're on. Two limits from Microsoft's page: "Clarity only supports IPv4 addresses," with no support for "IPv6 or dynamic IP addresses (for example, VPN)," and "mobile devices generally don't have a stable IP." You also need to be a project administrator. We hadn't set this up. Check yours today. Our guide to Clarity filters, segments and custom tags covers both layers of exclusion in full.
Repeat visitors who aren't customers. IP blocking only works going forward. For history, open the Filters panel and use Clarity user ID with Exclude selection checked. Enter the IDs of visitors you've identified as internal, a partner, or a monitoring tool. This also covers the phones and VPN connections IP blocking can't.
Sessions too short to watch. Under Session, set a minimum session duration of one minute. In our sample, 34 of 100 recordings lasted under 10 seconds. On September 24, 2026 alone, five sessions of one second each landed on five different blog posts within two minutes. Clarity had already excluded 86 bot sessions in the 30 days to September 26. These look automated and got through anyway.
If it fails: if you can't tell whether a repeat visitor is internal, open their Visitor Profile from the recording card. Microsoft says the profile history "can expand up to 9 months," though recordings older than 30 days can't be played. A visitor who returns again and again to the same page, never clicks, and never arrives from a search engine deserves a question to your team before you count them as a prospect. Exclude them from this review while you ask.
Step 3: Filter to your page
Open Filters, then Path. Use Entry URL if your question is about first impressions, or Visited URL if the page sits in the middle of a journey (a pricing page, a quote form reached from the homepage).
For the quote page question, Visited URL is right. In our sample, ten sessions entered or exited on the quote page and had at least one click, and six of those started on the homepage. An Entry URL filter would have missed all six.
If it fails: if the filtered list has fewer than 20 sessions, widen the date range to 30 days before loosening anything else. If it's still under 20, watch them all. The selection method exists for sites with too many recordings to watch.
Step 4: Add one frustration signal
Under User actions, Insights, pick the signal that fits your question. The definitions are Microsoft's; the "our use" notes are ours.
- Dead clicks: "a user clicks on an element but gets no feedback in a reasonable amount of time." Our use: "is something on this page not working?"
- Rage clicks: "the user clicks multiple times in a clustered area in rapid succession." Our use: "is something slow or broken?"
- Quick backs: a click away, then a return "under a certain threshold of time." Our use: "does a link promise something the next page doesn't deliver?"
- Excessive scrolling: "higher amounts of vertical scrolling than the expected average." Our use: "can people find what they came for?"
On our site, dead clicks were the signal with volume: 16 sessions (11.27%) over the 30 days to September 26, 2026, against one session with a rage click. Microsoft says a dead click "can signify broken elements, high latency requests, or misleading UX." On a brochure-style site, the third is the one to check first: a heading, photo or icon that looks clickable.
If it fails: if the signal filter returns nothing, that's an answer. Remove it and move to Step 5, where click count does the sorting instead.
Step 5: Sort by clicks, high to low
Clarity's recordings list sorts by date, duration, clicks or pages, each in either direction. There's no frustration or relevance sort.
Sort by Clicks: High to low. In our sample, 72 of 100 recordings had zero clicks, so a date-sorted list is roughly seven parts nothing to three parts something. Sorting by clicks puts the sessions where someone actually tried to do something at the top.
Duration is the trap. Our longest session that entered on the quote page ran 1 hour, 24 minutes across six pages with zero clicks. Long is not the same as engaged.
If it fails: if the top sessions by clicks are all from one or two visitors, you have more pool cleaning to do. Go back to Step 2.
Step 6: Watch with inactivity skipped, and stop at 20
In the player, turn on Skip inactivity, which Microsoft describes as "periods of inactivity on the page are skipped." Playback runs from 0.25x to 12x. Skipping inactivity also compresses the pauses you most want to see, so when the timeline jumps near a form or button, rewind and watch that stretch at normal speed. Hesitation is the thing you're looking for.
For each session, write one line: what they tried, where they stopped, and whether it answers your question. Favorite any recording you'll want to show someone. Standard recordings expire after 30 days, while favorited ones are kept for up to 9 months.
Stop at 20. If the same problem shows up in five or more, you have a finding. If 20 sessions show 20 different things, your question was too broad. Narrow it and run the process again.
If it fails: if you finish 20 sessions with nothing written down, blame the filter first. The cause we'd check first is an Entry URL filter on a page people reach from elsewhere. Switch to Visited URL and repeat Steps 3 to 5.
Step 7: Save the filter set as a segment
Click Save as segment at the top of the recordings page. Microsoft: "Your segments are available to everyone on your Project." Next month's review takes two minutes to set up instead of ten, and a teammate gets the same filters you used.
Name segments after the question, not the filters: "Quote page, clicked, no team" beats "Visited URL + clicks > 0."
If it fails: if a segment starts returning sessions it shouldn't, check for new internal traffic first. Add the new IDs to the exclusion and re-save.
What about Copilot's summaries?
The recordings page has a Summarize recordings button that, per Microsoft, "summarizes multiple session recordings at a time," either for recordings you select or for the top 10. It's useful as a cross-check after Step 6: summarize your 20 and see whether it names the same problem you wrote down.
We wouldn't use it as the selection step. On our site, a summary of unfiltered recordings could easily have been dominated by our four repeat visitors.
Where this fails
Low traffic hides patterns. At 142 sessions in 30 days (after Clarity's bot exclusion), a filtered pool can shrink to single digits. Individual recordings still find bugs, but they can't tell you how common a behavior is.
Masking hides content. In Clarity's default Balanced mode, numbers and email addresses are masked, and form inputs are masked in every mode. You can see that a field was used but not its contents. That's the right tradeoff, and it means a recording can't tell you which answer made someone abandon a form.
Live recordings don't follow these rules. Microsoft's FAQ caps the live view at 100 sessions, and its live recordings page lists sorting as unsupported. Use it to confirm a fix went live. Do the review on recorded sessions.
What does success look like?
You're done when you have a written list of problems, each seen in several of 20 filtered recordings, each tied to a specific element on a specific page. Our next review starts with the quote page, with the four repeat visitors excluded this time.
That list is where the dashboard's dead-click number turns into design work. Many of the fixes are covered in our guide to website conversion rate optimization.
If you want a second set of eyes on your recordings, our web design team can run this review on your site, starting with the same pool cleaning that caught our own four-visitor problem. Send us the page you're worried about.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I review session recordings?
Monthly for a stable site, and within a week of any change to a key page. After a redesign, filter to the changed page and the days since launch, and watch whether the old problem is gone before looking for new ones.
Can I share a Clarity recording with someone outside my team?
Yes. The share icon offers a link for your project team, which never expires, or a link "with anyone," where you choose an expiration in days. Masking is applied when the session is captured, so an outside viewer sees the same masked recording you do. Watch it yourself first for anything you wouldn't want forwarded.
Can I review mobile visitors separately?
Yes, and you should. Open Filters, then User info, then Device, and tick Mobile. Phone sessions fail differently: tap targets too close together, sticky banners covering buttons, forms that fight the keyboard. About 7% of our sessions (10) came from mobile browsers, so on our site a mobile-only review is a short list.
Why do some recordings have zero clicks but several pages?
Page changes can come from keyboard navigation, the back button, a refresh or a typed URL, and scrolling isn't a click. A zero-click, multi-page session is worth a look. A zero-click, one-page, one-second session rarely tells you anything.
Sources
- Microsoft Learn, Session list: sort options Date, Duration, Clicks and Pages; recording card fields; 30-day retention with favorites kept up to 9 months. learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2026-05-21, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Clarity filters: 30+ filters grouped as User Info, User Actions, Path, Traffic, Performance, Product, Session, Page and Custom Filters. learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2026-05-21, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Semantic metrics: definitions of dead clicks, rage clicks, quick backs and excessive scrolling. learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2025-12-01, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Inline player: skip inactivity; playback presets from 0.25x to 12x; Summarize recordings for selected or top 10 recordings. learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2026-05-21, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, IP blocking: "Block IP address", "Block my current IP", IPv4 only, no VPN or dynamic IPs, administrator required. learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2025-12-01, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Visitor profile: history "can expand up to 9 months." learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2026-05-12, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Segments: "Your segments are available to everyone on your Project." learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2025-01-16, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Masking: Balanced default; input boxes masked in all modes. learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2024-11-01, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Live recordings: sorting unsupported learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2025-09-29); Clarity FAQ: maximum of 100 live sessions learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2026-09-08). Both retrieved 2026-09-26.
- Microsoft Learn, Sharing in Clarity: project-team links never expire; "With anyone" links take an expiration in days. learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2024-06-04, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Semantic metrics: a dead click "can signify broken elements, high latency requests, or misleading UX." learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2025-12-01, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- ClickWerxs operator data: the 100 most recent recordings for clickwerxs.com (September 3 to 25, 2026) and the Clarity dashboard for the 30 days to September 26, 2026. Visitor IDs withheld.
Kaleb Dickhaut — Founder, ClickWerxs. Kaleb built ClickWerxs from the ground up, from payment processing ISO to the Command Center platform to the AI SEO methodology the blog runs on. He has onboarded hundreds of small businesses onto payment and CRM systems. linkedin.com/in/kaleb-dickhaut
Product details in this post reflect Microsoft's documentation and the Clarity interface as of September 26, 2026 and change often. ClickWerxs is not affiliated with Microsoft and earns revenue from the web design services described. This is operator opinion, not legal, financial, or professional advice.