It’s pretty easy to measure. I had a site with a verification step. And we would see like 20% drop off of people who clicked on the link but never confirmed. Not sure why. We didn’t have them copy and paste anything, just click a confirm button.

Switching to no confirm obviously changed this to 0% drop off of people who clicked the link, but the number of people who clicked was the same.

It was curious to me why people wouldn’t go through with the confirmation step, but never learned why. We just learned that for some reason more people click once instead of twice.

How would you have known if that 20% were real people and not bot activity?

I don’t necessarily. But they have active accounts that do stuff and had the drop off activity consistent with “normal users.”

So it doesn’t matter to me if they were bots or not.

For example, 100 users clicked on the first link, 80 completed, and had normal account activity (clicking on stuff, uploading and downloading things, etc).

100 users clicked on the second link and then had normal account activity.

Maybe they were all bots, but they seemed human based on the “normal activity.”

Nobody remembers the exact moment they stopped thinking about something because it was easier not to.

Ragequitting is one way to exit a process, but just not going to the next step from distraction is surely more common.

I'm asking because often when I talk to people about things they hate, they end up admitting it's not that big of a deal. The annoyance is minor enough they don't look for alternatives or abandon whatever they were doing.

The original discussion was about clicking links vs reading and entering the code in sign-up confirmations. The former takes less steps and is easier to complete. Power users with unusual habits might disagree. But if they complete the sign-up anyway, it makes more sense to focus on regular users.