Session Replay: A Comprehensive Guide to Implementation and Use

Session replay is a powerful tool that allows you to record and analyze user interactions on your website or application. This technology can be a game-changer for businesses looking to improve user experience and conversion rates.

By implementing session replay, you can gain valuable insights into how users navigate your site, what they click on, and where they get stuck. This information can be used to identify and fix usability issues, reducing bounce rates and increasing engagement.

Session replay tools typically record user interactions in the form of a video, providing a clear and concise view of the user's journey.

Session replay is a type of software solution that lets brands reproduce a user's journey on websites, products, or mobile apps.

This technology provides incredibly useful behavioral and experiential data that can be used to make website or app improvements. Session replay tools let brands recreate, understand and solve issues by tracking common indicators of frustration found during user sessions.

Session replay tools track the actual movement of the mouse throughout the customer journey, and when you watch session replays, you'll normally be presented with analytics around a few common activities.

Reviewing session replays allows you to analyze the user experience a website visitor had as if you've been sitting right next to them.

Session replay is a powerful tool that provides a direct and passive way to collect customer feedback. It lets organizations see exactly what the customer experience looks like, and can be used alongside digital experience analytics to highlight issues and areas for improvement.

Customer feedback is an incredibly powerful way to learn what your customers think about the experience of using your website or app. But people aren't always willing to fill in surveys or answer forms, and some issues might get missed or be hard to reproduce.

Session replay can help improve the customer experience by showing you what it's like to be a customer. With that experience data and insight, you'll be able to make definitive decisions about what needs to change, and why.

The aim of every business should be to improve the customer experience. Session replay provides a concrete way to do that by showing you, in no uncertain terms, what it's like to be a customer.

Here are some of the key use cases for session replay:

Session replay can be used by various teams, including sales, customer support, developers, content managers, and digital marketers. Each team can benefit from understanding how users navigate their websites.

In terms of specific benefits, session replay can help eCommerce teams reduce cart abandonment, improve the checkout customer experience, analyze and improve website navigation, and analyze traffic quality. It can also help product teams see how customers use their product, discover bugs and fix issues quickly, and easily convey the idea to developers. Analytics teams can use session replay to understand the context behind the numbers, create reports on customer experience, and alert campaign owners about something going wrong.

Implementing session replay software can take some time, depending on the complexity of your setup. It's a good idea to combine session replay with an analytical suite that can sort the signal from the noise and pull out actionable information.

To start, you'll need to set a sampling rate for user sessions and errored sessions. This can be done using the UI or the NerdGraph API. For example, you can set the session sampling rate to 50% and the error sampling rate to 100%, which means half of all user sessions will be recorded, and all errored sessions will be recorded.

Some session replay tools, like Amplitude, offer a clear picture of your customers and what they love, but you'll need to get started by picking a tool, signing up, and getting the tracking code for your website. You can then choose how to install the tracking code, such as using Google Tag Manager or pasting it directly into your website's admin panel.

If you need to prioritize specific actions over automatic sampling, you can disable automatic session replay tracking by setting the API configuration option autoStart to false. This ensures that session replays will not be created at all, even if the backend samples your application for recording.

Here's a quick rundown of the steps to get started with session replay:

A session replay tool uses a recording script installed on each page of the website to capture DOM and DOM mutations together with user events and some custom events.

This information is stored for each individual user session, allowing you to replay and analyze the user's experience.

The recording script is installed on each page, which means it captures all interactions, including what the user sees and experiences.

Session replay tools can present replays as videos or HTML, with the latter allowing you to inspect the elements' code within the session replay.

A video presentation can provide a more immersive experience, but an HTML presentation makes session recordings much more actionable.

To implement session replay, you'll need to pick a session replay tool, which can be a standalone offering or part of a wider suite of experience data and web analytics tools. These tools operate as an invisible layer between your website and your customers, providing insights based on captured behavioral data.

You can choose between standalone session replay software or a suite that combines session replay with other analytics tools. Suites like Qualtrics' Digital Experience Analytics can mix session replay with other behavioral heuristics to create unique dashboards showing the business impact of user engagement.

To get started, you'll need to sign up for a session replay tool, agree to the privacy policy, and get the tracking code for your website. You'll also need to decide how to install the tracking code, which can be done through Google Tag Manager or directly pasting the code into your website's admin panel.

The process of implementing session replay is relatively simple, but it's essential to ensure compliance and integrate your session replay tool with other analytics and A/B testing tools. This may involve manually updating the JavaScript snippet or configuring replay settings using the NerdGraph API.

Here are the general steps to follow:

Remember to also configure sampling rates, which can affect the reliability of your data. You may want to set a sampling rate for user sessions and errored sessions to ensure you're capturing the data you need.

To disable automatic tracking, you can set the API configuration option autoStart to false. This ensures that session replays will not be created at all, even if the backend samples your application for recording.

Setting autoStart to false instructs the agent to defer its initialization until explicitly called using .start(). This is useful in scenarios where you need to prioritize specific actions over automatic sampling.

By disabling automatic tracking, you can prevent session replays from automatically starting, even when sampled. This is particularly useful for sensitive pages, such as HIPAA-compliant ones.

In such cases, you can use the .start() API to manually trigger the replay feature after user consent is obtained. This gives you more control over when and how session replays are created.

When choosing a session replay tool, don't overlook the importance of integrations. Integrations can be a game changer for session replay, allowing you to share data between tools and narrow down your list of recordings more efficiently.

You can use integrations to quickly narrow down the list of recordings to those where people browsed a specific variation, for example. This is especially useful when you're trying to understand the impact of A/B testing on your users.

Integrating your session replay tool with website analytics tools like Google Analytics 4 or Adobe Analytics provides an option to filter recordings that belong to a certain cohort or have achieved a certain website goal. This can be a huge time-saver when you're trying to analyze user behavior.

You can also use integrations to filter out recordings that don't meet certain criteria, such as only watching recordings of people who interacted with a specific feature or form. This helps you focus on the most relevant data and avoid getting overwhelmed by too many recordings.

You can quickly identify friction points in user sessions by using session replay tools that track friction events.

Friction events are often shown on the timeline as small lightning icons.

To speed up the process, you can jump directly to the page where friction happened.

When choosing a location for recording sessions, consider the scope of your project. You want to record sessions from one website or from several, depending on your needs.

Not all tools support tracking multiple websites, so be sure to check the capabilities of your chosen platform. This is an important factor to consider before making a decision.

Recording sessions from multiple websites can help you identify patterns and trends across different platforms. However, it also increases the complexity of your project.

You may also want to consider tracking mobile apps, but not all user session replay platforms are capable of that. This limitation can impact the scope of your project and the insights you can gather.

Choosing the right session replay tool is crucial for a successful implementation. There are many options available, but it's easy to get lost in the ocean of choices.

Start by considering the criteria for choosing a session replay tool, such as the list of integrations it has. Integrations can really be a game changer, allowing you to share data between tools and filter recordings based on specific criteria.

Think about the types of integrations you need, such as A/B testing tools or website analytics tools like Google Analytics 4 or Adobe Analytics. Look for a tool that has a list of integrations it has.

To ensure you don't miss any important points in setting up your session replay tool, consider the following checklist:

By considering these factors and using the checklist, you'll be well on your way to choosing the right session replay tool for your needs.

Session replay tools are designed to shield private user data, actively guarding against capturing personally identifiable information (PII). Most modern suites have strong default settings to minimize the potential exposure of sensitive customer information.

You can further customize privacy settings to meet your specific needs, and session replay does not capture screenshots or videos. Instead, it records only the essential DOM state changes needed to reconstruct user interactions.

By default, all text and user inputs, including personal data, are masked within the recordings. This ensures that no personally identifiable information is readily visible. You can selectively unmask specific elements if needed, but the default provides a strong foundation for data privacy.

Session replay tools respect the users' privacy and want to stay compliant, so they don't capture any personally identifiable information (PII). They also don't capture sensitive data such as names and addresses, logins and passwords, etc.

Some session replay tools anonymize visitor data, not storing any information that could be used to identify a website visitor, such as their IP address. Mouseflow, for example, can give you a somewhat generalized location, but it doesn't transfer or store information about visitors' IP addresses to prevent identification.

The fields that need to be excluded from tracking to protect user privacy include:

By excluding these fields from tracking, you can ensure that sensitive information is not captured or stored.

Session replay tools allow you to record and analyze user interactions on your website or application.

You can record sessions in real-time, and even replay them to see exactly what users are experiencing. This helps you identify issues and bugs that might be causing frustration.

Session replay tools often include features like click mapping, which visualizes where users are clicking on your site. This can help you identify areas where users are getting stuck or frustrated.

By analyzing session replays, you can gain valuable insights into how users are interacting with your site, and make data-driven decisions to improve the user experience.

As a user, you likely care more about what you can do with something than how it works. Session replays are very different from CCTV recordings from the user's perspective.

What makes session replays unique is that they capture user events and provide detailed information about them as you watch the recording. This is in contrast to CCTV recordings, which might just show a user clicking a button that didn't work and leaving the site.

Session replays can identify exact errors and put them on the timeline of the replay, which is helpful for debugging and troubleshooting. This is because session replays capture the DOM with all user events.

Capturing DOM and DOM mutations instead of recording the screen allows session recording tools to respect users' privacy and exclude private information from being recorded.

Session replay works by logging 'events' and turning those events into a reconstruction. Every time a user moves their mouse over a website element clicks a button, or taps a link, that event is logged in the session replay software.

A good analogy for this is LEGO. Imagine we sit you down to make something out of LEGO bricks, and every time you snap two blocks together, we make a note of it. After you've left, if we then gave all those notes to someone else, they'd be able to faithfully recreate your creation in the exact same order – even if they couldn’t see you make it at the time.

Session replay takes a snapshot of the Document Object Model (DOM), which represents the page's structure and visual elements. The browser agent accesses your CSS files to ensure accurate styling information, and then integrates these styles directly into the replay recording.

By default, browser event data is stored for 8 days, but actual data retention depends on your account.

Session replay works by logging 'events', and turning those events into a visual recreation of the user's journey around your site or app. This is done by piecing together all the events in order, to form a faithful recreation of the user's session.

Here's a breakdown of what's stored in a replay:

Session replay has its technical and operational aspects that are worth noting.

To start with Session Replay, you need to enable it for your web applications.

Session Replay can be configured for web applications, which is a crucial step in getting it up and running.

You should be aware of the technical restrictions for Session Replay on web applications, as they can impact how you use the feature.

Here are some key technical and operational considerations for Session Replay:

Dead clicks are a common issue where users click on non-interactive elements on a page, thinking they're buttons or links. This can be frustrating for users and indicate a UI misunderstanding.

These clicks often occur on decorative elements, such as images or icons, that have no functionality. This can happen when a user is trying to navigate a website or complete a task, but is unsure what to do.

A key point to note is that session replay can help identify dead clicks, allowing you to understand where users are getting stuck and why. This can be done by analyzing user behavior and identifying patterns of interaction.

Here are some common examples of dead clicks:

By understanding and addressing dead clicks, you can improve the user experience and make your website more intuitive and user-friendly.

You can use Session Replay to view, analyze, reproduce, and fix errors. This is especially helpful when you need to understand the exact user actions that led to an error.

For error drill-down, you don't need to have all sessions recorded. You can use cost and traffic control for web applications to record only a subset of sessions, which can be as low as 20% of sessions.

Developers can use Session Replay to observe the customer impact by replaying and viewing a session when the problem isn't obvious. This helps you understand the severity of the problem and its effect on user experience.

To resolve customer complaints, it's ideal that all sessions be recorded. However, to save storage space, a lower retention time can be set. The default data retention time is applied to these sessions.

For customer complaint resolution, you can use Session Replay to see the exact journey of the customer in your application, identify the exact problem faced by the user, and provide correct instructions.

Error Drill-Down is a powerful tool for developers to troubleshoot and fix errors. It allows you to drill down further into the details of detected errors.

You can detect errors and other issues, understand the exact user actions that led to an error, and understand the severity of the problem and its effect on user experience. This helps you identify the root cause of the issue and take corrective action.

Developers can use Session Replay to view, analyze, reproduce, and fix errors. You can use cost and traffic control for web applications to record only a subset of sessions, which can be enough to detect errors even if only 20% of sessions are recorded.

The default data retention timeframe is applied to these sessions, so you don't have to worry about storing too much data. The ability to play back recorded user sessions with or without playback masking settings is permission controlled, which helps maintain user confidentiality.

Here are the benefits of using Session Replay for error drill-down:

Complaint resolution is a crucial part of providing excellent customer support. Session Replay is a powerful tool that can help you resolve customer complaints efficiently.

To resolve customer complaints, you can use Session Replay to see the exact journey of the customer in your application. This allows you to identify the exact problem faced by the user.

Session Replay provides the means to resolve customer complaints by offering a clear picture of what the user did. This helps you provide correct instructions to the customer.

It's ideal to have all sessions recorded for customer complaint resolution, but to save storage space, a lower retention time can be set. This way, you can still access the necessary information without storing too much data.

The default data retention time is applied to these sessions, so be sure to check your settings if you're unsure.