Why are Click Maps and Inspect Mode showing different click counts?

When using Fullstory’s Page Insights you may notice that certain CSS selectors have different click counts displayed between Click Maps and Inspect Mode. Due to technical limitations, the click counts within Click Maps and Inspect Mode are currently being measured and aggregated differently.

How are clicks being calculated within Inspect Mode?

Inspect Mode is calculating clicks based on a specific CSS selector. This allows our backend to perform an exhaustive search for all instances of the selector in question and aggregate the number of clicks across every variation of the selector in question. 

How are clicks being calculated within Click Maps?

Click Maps is calculating clicks based on the top 1,000 selectors on the page. This limitation helps us allow you to easily analyze your most clicked elements, while also ensure that Fullstory continues to perform well for all customers. We can't, for example, analyze an infinite number of selectors, so we limit the number that can be measured.

As a result, the click numbers displayed within Click Maps might not include all variations of a given selector. The data in Click Maps is accurate to show a comparison of the most clicked elements on a page but, depending on the situation, not necessarily the absolute click count. 

Example:

HTML body div#mainPanel span span.active  -> Clicked 15,000 times
HTML body div#mainPanel span span.inactive  -> Clicked 10 times

Here we have two different strings that represent the same selector. Depending on the number of unique selectors you have on the specific page you're analyzing within Fullstory, you might not see the clicks from the second selector when analyzing this particular element within Click Maps since we're only analyzing the top 1,000 selectors on the page.  

As a result, you could see higher click numbers for this selector in Inspect Mode than in Click Maps.

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