What is Session Replay?

What is Session Replay?

Session replay is the recorded session of user interactions on a website or an app.

You can watch these recorded sessions to understand how users interact with your product and where they are finding usability issues.

What is Session Replay Software?

Session replay software is a tool that helps you capture, record and analyze user interactions. It allows you to replay user journeys and interactions, offering insights into their behavior and experience.

Some key features a session replay software should have are as follows.

• Capturing all user interactions, including clicks, scrolls, and keystrokes.
• Visual replay of user sessions showing interactions.
• Analyzing user behavior patterns, identifying issues, and insights to improve user experience.
• Heatmaps to show where users click, move their mouse and scroll.

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Key Benefits of Session Replay

Session replays offer a range of benefits to boost your product performance. The following 5 of the most crucial benefits it brings to the table.

Benefit 1 – Improved UX

You can pinpoint areas where users find it difficult to use or navigate through. As a result, by clearly understanding these, you can make informed decisions to make design and functional improvements. This will lead to better and smoother user experience.

Benefit 2 – Increased Conversion Rate

By analyzing the customer journey sessions, you can spot the areas where users are dropping off. You can focus on those touchpoints, improve them, and prompt your customers down the sales funnel. This way, you can make sure the users reach where you want, and improve conversion rate.

A/B testing different versions of pages could be helpful in getting qualitative insights into how users interact.

Benefit 3 – Top-Tier Customer Support

Session replays allow the customer support team to see exactly what the issues users faced. Thus it makes it easier to understand customer frustrations and resolve them quickly and accurately.

Benefit 4 – Informed Decision Making

Session replays are really helpful for designers and developers. Instead of assuming the efficiency of certain elements in the website, they make decisions that are more customer-centric. Not to mention its ability to help measure the impact of the changes and track performance over time.

Benefit 5 – Troubleshooting Errors

Session replays can act as the best way to find and troubleshoot errors. By checking the user sessions, you can identify the bugs and errors they encounter. Not only that but also you can know exactly where these bugs or errors are. Therefore making it easier to diagnose and fix these issues.

How Does Session Replay Work?

We won’t be getting too much into the technicalities. However, the following offers you a simple overview of how session relay works. Let’s have a look at them.

Step 1 – Collect Data

The process starts by implementing a JavaScript code snippet into your website or app. It’s this code that tracks user interactions. The interactions can be anything from mouse movements to page navigations.

The information about the user’s device, browser, screen resolution and so on will also be collected during this process.

Step 2 – Data Transmission

The collected (or recorded) data is then transmitted to servers in real-time or near real-time. The data will be stored securely on the servers, where it can be processed and accessed for analysis.

Step 3 – Processing the Data

Now, the session replay software will process the collected raw data to reconstruct user interactions. It will create a cohesive narrative by piecing together all key user actions within the website.

Afterward, each session is indexed and cataloged. This will be with meta data such as user location, device type and session duration.

Step 4 – Playback Visualization

This is where the visual replay happens. It renders the processed data by simulating the exact user experience. It will feel like a video showcasing exactly what the users did and saw.

Like every other video, you can pause, fast forward, or rewind the sessions and closely evaluate them.

Step 5 – Analysis and Reporting

Session replay software uses heatmap analysis to show the common interaction patterns of users. Once that’s done, it analyzes user journey through defined funnels. This is to identify drop-off points and optimize conversion rates.

As a result, you can identify where exactly users encounter issues. Resolving these issues at the earliest can lead to improved performance and UX.

Blend Session Replay and Surveys For Deeper Customer Insights

Session replay understand how customer navigate, but surveys reveal their needs and expectations. Try for Free!

Signup

14-Day-Free Trial • Cancel Anytime • No Credit Card Required • Need a Demo?

Who Can Benefit From Session Replay?

For someone who read about session replay so far, you might think that it only benefits a few. But the truth is the contrary. It can be beneficial to a whole lot of teams other than designers and developers.

Let’s have a look at them.

Who	Benefit	How
UX/UI Designers	Improved User Experience Design	Analyze interactions to identify usability issues and make design improvements.
Product Managers	Enhanced Product Development	Gain insights into user behavior to prioritize features and validate product decisions.
Marketing Teams	Optimized Marketing Strategies	Understand user engagement to refine campaigns and improve conversion paths.
Customer Support Teams	More Effective Support	View user issues directly to resolve support tickets faster and improve satisfaction.
Developers	Efficient Bug Fixing	Identify and troubleshoot bugs based on real user interactions.
E-commerce Managers	Increased Sales and Conversions	Optimize the shopping experience to reduce cart abandonment and boost sales.
Business Analysts	Informed Decision Making	Use quantitative and qualitative data to understand trends and make data-driven decisions.
Quality Assurance (QA) Teams	Improved Testing Processes	Reproduce bugs and ensure product quality through user flow analysis.
Compliance Officers	Ensured Regulatory Compliance	Monitor user interactions to meet industry regulations and standards.
Content Creators	Enhanced Content Engagement	Adjust content based on user interaction data to better meet audience needs.
Sales Teams	Improved Lead Conversion	Tailor pitches and follow-ups based on user behavior and preferences.
Executives and Stakeholders	Strategic Insights	Inform business strategy and resource allocation with high-level user insights.

Let’s see the use cases in detail.

Use Cases of Session Replay

We have already discussed some use cases of session replay like customer support and design team. So, here we will be discussing the others.

Session Replay in eCommerce

How does it help? Cart abandonment analysis and product page enhancement.

With session replay, you can identify where users drop off during the checkout process. Using the insights, you can optimize the flow to reduce the abandonment rate. Similarly, by understanding how users interact with a product page, you can improve its layout, CTAs, and so on to drive more conversions.

Session Replay in SaaS

How does it help? User onboarding and feature adoption.

Analyze the new user sessions to streamline the onboarding process and retain users. With respect to feature adoption, see how users interact with it and spot areas that need improvement for better adoption.

Session Replay in Product Development

How does it help? User feedback and bug tracking.

Improving the product experience would mean relying on crucial user feedback. Session replays, without running a survey, offer just that. Learn how users navigate through your product, check for confusion, key elements obscure to users, and so on. Not to mention the bugs experienced by the users.

All these can provide helpful and reliable insights to improve your product for the better.

Suggested Read: Best Product Feedback Tools

Session Replay in Marketing

How does it help? A/B testing.

Creating new landing pages is a key part of marketing, but how can you know whether the page is working or not? That’s where session replay comes in. Create different versions of the page and test them out. The one where user interactions are high will be the best option.

Session Replay in Education

How does it help? Student engagement.

Use session replays to monitor how students interact with an online course material. This can be helpful in identifying what ticks the students and their engagement level. Thus it helps you improve the online learning experience.

Pro Tip: You can also use session replay to do usability testing of the online learning platform.

Helpful Read: Top Student Feedback tools for Teachers

Session Replay in Healthcare

How does it help? Patient portal optimization.

Patient portals play a crucial role in increasing patient experience. Therefore, it’s necessary that you keep optimizing these portals for ease of use and intuitiveness. Use session replay to understand how your patients navigate through the portals and improve it for the better.

7 Best Session Replay Tools

With all you have learned today, you might be eager to try out some session replay tools and software. Well, if you are that interested, then try out the following tools.

Tool 1 – Hotjar

Key features: Session recordings, heatmaps, feedback polls, and form analysis.

It provides a complete toolset for understanding user behavior and gathers their feedback. The tool is easy to set up and offers a user-friendly UI.

Tool 2 – FullStory

Key features: Session replays, heatmaps, analytics, conversion funnels, and error tracking.

The tool offers robust analytics capabilities to find specific user sessions. It’s also intuitive and is ideal for those who want detailed user behavior analysis.

Tool 3 – Crazy Egg

Key features: Session recordings, heatmaps, A/B testing, and scroll maps.

This session replay tool provides a clear visual representation of user interactions. On top of that, it also allows for easy testing of changes to improve website performance.

Tool 4 – Mouseflow

Key features: Session recordings, heatmaps, form analytics, and user feedback.

Mouseflow helps you find user pain points and conversion issues with their detailed session replays. It also offers a comprehensive analytics feature, which can further aid in improving the overall experience.

Tool 5 – Inspectlet

Key features: Session replays, heatmaps, form analytics, and error logging.

If you are looking for a high-fidelity session recording and in-depth analytics, Inspectlet would be the right choice. It makes understanding user behavior easy and offers insights to improve usability.

Tool 6 – LogRocket

Key features: Session replays, performance monitoring, error tracking, and user analytics.

The tool combines session replay with performance and error tracking to provide a complete picture of the user experience. You can also see what are the technical issues within your website (or app) with LogRocket.

Tool 7 – Smartlook

Key features: Session recordings, heatmaps, funnels, and event tracking.

Apart from the session replays, it offers powerful filtering and segmentation options. This way, it allows for detailed analysis of specific user segments and behaviors.

Helpful Read: Read more product analytics tools you ca try out to improve the user experience.

Blend Surveys and Session Replay for Deeper User Insights

It’s clear as day that session replays are handy when it comes to improving usability. But if you are someone keen on improving the overall customer experience, then we suggest you consider a blend of surveys and session replays.

While session replays can help you understand how users interact and behave, surveys can reveal what they actually want. Surveying customers directly can provide insights into their expectations and satisfaction – plus point if you are using tools like SurveySparrow.

An example of how the blend of both can be helpful is as follows.

Suppose you are running an eCommerce platform. You used session replay to understand that customers are facing difficulties at the checkout process. The issues were found and resolved to your best effort. But even after making the changes you are seeing a drop off at the same touchpoint.

Now comes surveys. You formulated a survey and shared it with your customers. The intent is to understand what exactly is the problem faced by the users. The feedback came in, and upon analysis, you found out that the reason behind the drop-off was because of the lack of payment portals.

As it turns out, most of your users were using a particular payment portal that wasn’t supported on your website. Building on these insights, you added 2 more payment portals, again based on user feedback. Finally, improving the usability as well as the user experience.

Hope you got the gist.

If you are wondering which survey software to use – try SurveySparrow. It offers a free forever plan and a 14-day free trial, both you can exploit to explore the tool to the fullest. Understand its intuitiveness and efficiency for yourself and start surveying.

Blend Session Replay and Surveys For Deeper Customer Insights

Session replay understand how customer navigate, but surveys reveal their needs and expectations. Try for Free!

Signup

14-Day-Free Trial • Cancel Anytime • No Credit Card Required • Need a Demo?