The Definitive Guide to Session Replay & Visitor Recording

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03 Nov- 6 min read

In this article, we are considering what a session replay is and how businesses can benefit from it to improve website performance and visibility in the online world.

Today, business success significantly depends on the company’s online presence. The website has become the primary representation of the brand in the online world. That’s why delivering a smooth web experience has become very important. It directly affects the company’s popularity, customer loyalty, and conversions.

Many marketers and UX design experts are looking for the magic wand to optimize the online customer experience for more conversions. Session replay and visitor recording tools are likely what they are looking for. This article considers a session replay under the magnifying glass and its main benefit for the business.

What Is Session Replay?

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User session replay is the video recording of the website visitor’s activity. There are different kinds of session replay software and digital tools allowing you to capture the real user’s clicks, scrolling, typing, and mouse movements.

Session replay tools allow marketers and UX experts to capture the website user activity like the student takes notes at the lecture. These notes serve as guide points that help students restore the entire lecture in memory. Likewise, session replay tools record meaningful data about all the website visitor interactions. The most advanced session replay tools can segment this data and identify website experience aspects that need improvements.

What Can You See With Website Visitor Recordings?

Website visitor recording tools allow organizations to access many useful insights. This kind of software records the entire user journey. It enables marketers, web designers, and developers to see every single click and action taken by the potential customer on the site. It also allows investigating where users spend the most time on a web page and detect what affects conversions. 

These findings give enterprises a realistic vision and understanding of how their online customers interact with them via a website. Such research has become the new must-have for every modern business, as it enables you to identify technical problems and marketing mistakes, leading to decreased conversion rates or inconvenient online customer experience. Thanks to user session replay tools, you can save a lot of time to figure out why your website doesn’t bring sales or experiences a drop in traffic.

It also empowers you to understand what customers expect to see on your site (e.g. what kind of content, buttons, or menus) and what may help improve their online experience. Visitor session recordings provide businesses with vital insights about their online presence and interaction with potential customers.

The Benefits of Session Replay & Visitor Recording Tools for Business

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As mentioned before, a user session replay is an accurate recreation of the user interactions with a website. Organizations can effectively solve their business problems by analyzing these sessions. 

Conversion rate optimization

User session replay tools are perfect for conversion rate optimization. They enable businesses to focus on the customer journey, detect what affects conversions, and optimize website user experience accordingly.

Understand and improve the user experience (UX)

Today, we experience the constant evolution of the user experience design. Digital products and online services are becoming even more accessible to people. Websites aren’t an exception. By watching user session recordings, enterprises can improve user experience design more efficiently.

Discover and observe user frustration

User session recording tools can help you eliminate user frustration. There are many reasons for it, from the inconvenient payment process and problems logging into the user account to confusing site navigation. By watching user session replays, you can identify these issues and handle them timely.

Investigate and optimize marketing funnels

A marketing funnel is the customer’s journey from the first interaction with the brand to completing a conversion. User session recordings allow businesses to see the entire marketing funnel from the customer perspective, monitor how users browse every web page, scan content, and optimize their journey upon these insights. 

The 5 Best Session Replay Tools

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Creabl

Creabl is a helpful web analytics tool that includes the user session replay feature. It enables the recording of the user journey from the first second of browsing the website to the moment a person leaves it. Moreover, Creabl allows you to learn more about customers by analyzing user behavior insights provided by advanced website analytics. 

It also lets you learn who your visitors are, where they come from, and what operating systems and browsers they use. Another attractive advantage is that Creabl offers a 14-day free trial, so you can try out all the benefits of this tool before purchasing a premium plan.

LuckyOrange

LuckyOrange is a website analytics tool that focuses mainly on user session replay and visitor recording. One of the most distinctive features of this software is the real-time visitor map that demonstrates how people browse web pages, scan content and navigate a site right at that moment.

UserReplay

UserReplay is another excellent option for enterprises looking for user session recording tools. This software offers an incredibly accurate representation of all user clicks, mouse movements, scrolling, typing, and more. 

What sets UserReplay apart from other tools is that it allows the team to collaborate on the user experience research. In UserReplay, you can generate the link to share the user session recording with others. It also allows your team to leave notes on the sessions and collaborate more effectively.

LogRocket

LogRocket is another handy web analytics tool that focuses solely on user session replays and visitor recording. It provides a remarkably accurate recreation of every website visitor session. LogRocket’s main peculiarity is that it highlights website issues when they are detected during the user session analysis. The software automatically identifies moments that indicate user frustration and helps eliminate them more effectively.

ClickTale

Click is a cloud-based analytics service that provides user session recordings on websites and mobile applications. This user session replay software offers other helpful features like heat mapping and forms analytics. ClickTale allows businesses to filter the visitor session recordings by the demographics, types of mouse movements, on-site behavior, and other metrics.

Conclusion

User session replay software is a powerful modern-day tool that allows businesses to identify precisely how customers interact with their website or application. The ability to see what its customers see on the website opens many opportunities for businesses. First of all, it allows improving website UX design more effectively, optimizing a marketing funnel, and detecting the user frustration areas that might affect conversions. 

In this article, we have reviewed the five best session replay and visitor recording tools available on the web today. Although all of these platforms have a similar mission, they vary by the level of convenience, effectiveness, and some additional web analytics features. Hopefully, these insights will help you better understand how your business can benefit from the user session recordings and improve your website performance.

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