Session recordings are renderings of real actions taken by visitors as they browse a website. Recordings capture mouse movement, clicks, taps, and scrolling across multiple pages on desktop and mobile devices.
Also known as session replays, user recordings, and user/visitor replay tools, session recordings are used to gain a real understanding of how users interact with a website, which then helps fix issues, optimize UX, and ultimately improve conversion rate.
Session recordings allow you to analyze user behavior throughout a session. You can replay user actions to understand user perspective, traffic source, session timing, and so on. You can group user sessions through filters.
5 ways session recordings help you understand your customers
Recordings and replays are an extremely powerful tool for gaining insight into how users behave—they are one of the closest things to being in the same room as your users and see exactly how they interact with your site. Here are five of the most popular ways session recordings can teach you more about your customers.
- Understand and empathize with your visitors’ experience
Putting yourself in your users’ shoes allows you to empathize with them, experience what they’re going through as they browse your website, and build a more enjoyable and efficient user experience as a result. It doesn’t take more than 10-20 recordings to start seeing where visitors are getting stuck—and you may even already spot what’s persuading them to convert.
- See how users interact with specific website elements
Session recordings let you really zoom in on how users interact with key elements on your website. Where users focus, what they click on, which sections they spend a lot of time on, what they skip over… recordings allow you to stop speculating about it all and start using real data to make impactful changes.
- Discover bugs, issues, and obstacles
Watching session replays where users get stuck, confused, and frustrated as they experience issues is one of the fastest ways to improve your website.
Barriers (obstacles that stop a customer from progressing) can be both technical and informational: look out for broken elements and loading issues in addition to misleading micro-copy or unclear instructions.
- Find out why people are leaving your website
Spot opportunities to reduce bounce rates and keep people on your website by watching session replays from users who left your site without converting.
Look for patterns of user behavior—did they navigate erratically? Did they miss an important link? Did they encounter a bug? Answer these questions and you’ll know what needs improving.
- Help team members, clients, and stakeholders make decisions
Recordings are easy to share, straightforward to watch, and provide evidence for getting people onboard before making design decisions and optimizations.
Whether you’re a UX designer, CRO specialist, or marketer, user session recordings will help you make data-driven decisions and showcase the effectiveness of your work to people across teams.