What is meant by session recording?
Session recording is a powerful tool that provides a recorded presentation of how a user navigates a website or mobile application. It operates by recording visitor actions such as clicks, mouse movements, and page scrolling as they move across the website. Traditional analytics tools also capture much of this data, but session recordings place it into context through replayable videos of user experiences.
It records and saves visitor sessions, offering extra information to utilize during the website optimization process to increase conversions.
Session recording speeds up a data-mining procedure that would often take weeks or even months by enabling you to view how visitors interact with your website in real-time.
Actions tracked by session recording tools
Below is a detailed explanation of how a session recording functions:
- It records mouse clicks, scrolling, and motions, which may help you determine whether a visitor is puzzled or what is grabbing their interest along with the ease to access the website content.
- Recording screen resizing helps in identifying and resolving issues and difficulties encountered if a user resizes the browser size amidst the session.
- It records page changes whenever a visitor refreshes a page or navigates to another page.
- It captures and displays user interactions with any forms available on the website that need to be filled.
- It makes accessible the page views per session.
- With session recording, it is possible to gather information such as the location, type of device and operating system, and gender of the users. This information is extremely useful for website optimization.
- It tracks and accumulates data related to the time of the user’s visit which in turn helps in determining when the website receives maximum traffic that assists in scheduling the content display.
- Scrolling patterns of users.
Insights available with session recording
Session recordings highlight the areas where the ideal processes outlined in your customer journey map are not being adhered to by displaying how visitors interact with each component of your website.
The recordings reveal the user pain points along with product performance issues that are diverting users off that ideal course whenever they wander from it.
Below are a few insights gained while watching a session recording:
- A user taking too long to complete an action: This data might indicate they are doubtful about how to move ahead. Contextual support such as tooltips could help enhance user experience
- Abandoned forms: Users leaving forms incomplete can indicate shortening or simplifying of forms to aid completion and reduce drop-off.
- Users bouncing away: Bouncing away from your site immediately suggests that the value of your product isn’t instantly obvious when users land on your site. Keep tabs on their behavior before leaving to plan changes that will guide them towards realizing the value sooner.
- Erratic scrolling patterns and rage clicks: These demonstrate poor UI design or bugs that could be blamed for irate consumers not receiving the desired outcome. Users may be assisted by providing in-app prompts or by examining the navigation or information design.
- Pages that don’t load properly on specific browsers or devices.
- Page components that are flawed or absent.
- Ineffective functionalities such as login timeout, etc.
Benefits of session recording
- Session recording tools provide insights as mentioned in the above section that can help in displaying content that will attract visitors and lead to higher conversions.
- It indicates the traffic source for the website, knowing which allows you to focus your efforts on that platform.
- A session recording displays the customers’ journey across the website i.e. the pages they viewed, the material they downloaded, and the time they left. Having this information helps in audience segmenting and creating relevant content to improve the customer experience.
- It enables you to view the most user-preferred products and services and the performance of any running campaign.
- It is an easy way to discover new sales leads in real time when a visitor visits your site.
- Session recording tools enable you to understand visitors on a more personal level. In addition to understanding how users behave on the website, this data provides you with essential details about their interests, the number of pages they see during a session, and their social network connections.
Features of a good session recording tool
The process of discovering more about potential customers is not only simplified by session recording, but it also becomes relatively affordable. This is achievable if the session recording tool offers the following capabilities:
- Visitor recordings
- Session replays
- Behavior analytics
- Easy configuration/technology compatibility
- Insightful dashboard
- Advanced filtering
- Data retention
- Website performance
- A reasonable pricing
Who in the team can use and benefit from session recording?
The session recording is beneficial to anybody working to enhance the digital customer experience. This encompasses a diverse group of individuals inside an organization, such as:
- Product team: Playback of sessions with website failures allows product managers to locate technical faults. Instead of attempting to decipher the user-written bug reports, they may then conduct investigations to quickly identify and resolve problems.
- Design/UX research team: Watching session recordings of users engaging with the existing website design might help UX teams understand the difficulties that their consumers are experiencing. For instance, the session replay may reveal that a certain element on the webpage is too far down the page, which prevents people from accessing it. This data may be used by your design/UX research team to do an A/B test that would move the element to the top of the page, perhaps increasing viewership.
- Customer support team: Customer support personnel can quickly and more effectively fix customer problems thanks to session replays, that provide details on the problems consumers are experiencing. Understanding your customer’s problem is much simpler if you can see it from their perspective.
- Marketing team: Session replays are used by marketers to boost customer engagement and conversion rates. By utilizing the qualitative information in session replays, marketers are better equipped to perform more efficient testing and website experiments and create effective landing pages for their campaigns.
Understanding what is going on in the background can help you take full advantage of all that your website can accomplish for your company. Website session records contain a wealth of information that is just waiting to be examined so you can make the appropriate website adjustments and create the most effective sales and marketing campaigns. VWO Session recording is an ideal tool offering the capabilities mentioned earlier, that will help you navigate the complicated digital world. For more in-depth knowledge about the session recordings, refer to this guide.
