Dive Brief:

• Website analytics firm FullStory, which devised its Rage Clicks measurement capability as a way to gauge customer frustration with websites and apps, has unveiled Rage Grades, a letter-based scoring system based on the quality of experience users have with web sites and percentile rankings that compare them to their sector peers, the company announced this week.

• The grades are compiled from a tally of signals that make up Rage Clicks, described by FullStory as "those moments when your users rapid-fire click (or tap) some element on your website, figuratively punching their browser in the face in frustration. Similar signals include "Error Clicks, Dead Clicks, Form Abandonment, and Thrashing Mouse," the company said.

• Rage Grades are available for users of FullStory Pro and a site that receives a Rage Grade of A- or lower will be able to view a list of the top 10 sessions that contributed to the grade to help them correct problems and improve experiences.

Dive Insight:

Improving conversion rates is an ongoing struggle for even the most successful online retailers. Cart abandonment was a $4.6 trillion problem in 2016 and part of the reason it continues to be is that its caused by a wide variety of problems, some obvious and others less so.

The site performance glitches that induce rage clicks certainly play a role in cart abandonment, but it is difficult to get a read on the specific things that are happening (or more accurately, not happening) that cause rage-clicking. That's where firms that employ site session replay, such as FullStory, come in handy. They can provide a glimpse into user sessions to show site owners, such as retailers, where it all went wrong.

There is some debate, however, even among session replay companies, about how much site owners looking to improve conversion rates should focus on rage clicks. After all, a lot of things can cause people to get mad and even if someone is pounding on their mouse or touchscreen, it doesn't necessarily mean site issues are causing their anger.

Basically, information about rage clicks needs to be packaged with more depth and perspective to be useful. Rage Grades appear to deliver that by giving site owners a sense of how they are performing individually and compared to their sector peers. They also give site owners a chance to understand where the biggest or most frequently recurring problems lie. There might be many different reasons customers fail to convert and abandon carts, but retail site operators should jump at the chance to better understand a few of those reasons.