What is Session Replay?
Session Replay
Session replay is the replication of a visitor’s journey on a website. Also known as session recording, session playback, and user replay, session replays form an indispensable part of your optimization process and improve your conversion rates and CRO activities (conversion rate optimization). It assists in visualizing what anonymous visitor experiences in your website or your application. With session replays, you can record your visitors’ movements like clicks, taps, keystrokes, and scrolls in real-time and effectively improve customer experience.
What are the Benefits of Using Session Replay?
Reproduce and Solve Bugs Faster
Every website, app, or digital platform will at some point have bugs and errors.
While these can range from quick fixes to complicated code issues, the real difficulty comes in reproducing the error so your developers can determine what the bugs are.
Session replay allows you to view a customer’s real digital experience and discover exactly where issues arise during the session on your site.
You’ll be able to quickly identify where friction points arise in the customer session and see where any bottlenecks occur between multiple users.
Increase Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversions are the specific actions that users take that move them through your marketing and sales funnels. For example, someone filling out a form is a conversion to move them from a contact to an interested prospect.
Likewise, actions like clicking CTA links, downloading specific offers, and buying an item are conversions.
One struggle that marketers have is figuring out why conversions aren’t happening at the rate that they predicted.
Understand the User Experience
As mentioned above, the user experience is often the key to understanding your users and discovering the best ways to communicate and market to your audiences.
Because session replay is created on the exact actions real users take on your site, you are allowed to get a real glimpse into their behavior and experience.
Support Customers Faster Through Context
It can be hard to support your customers when you don’t understand exactly what their pain points and sticking points are on your digital website.
When a customer sends a request or makes a ticket for an issue, customer service and IT departments often don’t have any context for that issue, meaning that they might miss the real problem.
Session replay allows teams to get the real context behind each issue that a customer experiences.
Challenges of Session Replay:
Protecting sensitive information
It can be difficult to capture only the data you need to improve your users’ experiences while still excluding any sensitive user information. To limit or block access to sensitive information, you may need to make sure the role-based access control (RBAC) permissions in session replay are the same as those used in the rest of your apps. You may also want to look for session replay marketing tools that allow you to automatically exclude information entered into certain fields (e.g., password or username).
Tool sprawl
Session replay works best when combined with quantitative data from other monitoring digital tools. As a result, you may end up with tool sprawl and an inefficient, redundant stack. Additionally, all of these tools typically require developer implementation, adding potential roadblocks for non-technical teams looking to adopt session replay.
Design changes
Many session replay tools automatically reflect updates in your application’s design, which may prevent you from being able to analyze the same interface your users saw. To avoid missing key visual features that influenced your users’ decisions, you might have to manually save past versions of your layout. This can require extra effort and resources–you may have to store every cached version of your app, then manually retrieve the relevant design when you want to review a session.