Do you want to learn more about customer journeys, research your website visitor’s preferences, and detect what affects your conversion rate? Here we are considering how you can achieve it by applying user session recording tools.
With the advent of new tech innovations, businesses have accessed more opportunities to explore consumer behavior and provide better online experiences. Now, digital marketing, business analysis, and UX research might be combined in beneficial user session recording tools.
To stay competitive, companies need to have a profound understanding of their target audience and the market. Many businesses are ready to increase their budgets for digital marketing and website analytics tools to access more information about what their customers need and want. And it’s worth it since this information can give brands a competitive edge in the market and help them grow rapidly. One of the easiest and most effective ways to research online customer behavior is by analyzing website visitor session recordings.
What Are Session Recordings (Session Replays)?
The user session recording or session replays is a video recording of the entire website visitor journey made using special website analytics tools. They allow marketing specialists and UX designers to see how real users interact with a website and detect the areas for improvement. For instance, they can help you determine what web pages have the most visits, what section on a website is the most popular, and where users face obstacles in UX.
Session recording tools provide website analytics insights from the qualitative point of view. This information is an absolute goldmine for businesses as it allows them to have a clear understanding of the online customer experience and improve it accordingly.
Pros and Cons of User Session Recording Tools
User session recording is the ultimate customer experience research method that empowers brands to level up several aspects of brand positioning simultaneously, including website UX, digital marketing, and customer service. However, the benefits of user session recording tools aren’t limited by those mentioned above. Like any other kind of website analytics software, user recording tools have disadvantages as well. Let’s consider all of them in detail.
Pros
- You can replay individual user sessions.
- This method empowers you to eliminate technical bugs and user experience design issues more effectively.
- It allows you to watch how people are interacting with your website in real-time.
- This practice can help you test different content, pop-ups, marketing messages, contact forms, etc.
- It also allows you to see how your customer reacts to new features, products, and updates.
- It enables you to detect problems in a sales funnel that has caused a decrease in conversions.
Cons
- It’s quite a time-consuming method, as it requires watching and analyzing numerous video-recordings to make more precise conclusions about any website issue or determine customer behavior patterns.
- In case if some tools don’t collect user information anonymously, they may expose user data to privacy-related risks.
- You don’t access any customer’s explanations of why they have opted to take a particular action on a website. The understanding of the user is entirely based on the company. That’s why some information might be misinterpreted.
The Best Session Recording Tools
Creabl
Creabl is a convenient web session recording software. It helps you conduct in-depth UX research and customer experience investigation, providing consumer behavior insights based on user session recordings. It captures user clicks, scrolls, mouse movements, and other user interactions on a website. This tool also allows you to see what your customers see when browsing a site and provides user activity heatmaps.
Moreover, it also enables you to learn more about your online visitors, providing anonymous information about the country, city, browser language, override language, etc. An appealing advantage is that Creabl offers a free 14-day trial so that users can experience the benefits of this amazing tool before purchasing it.
Hotjar
Hotjar is an excellent website analytics tool that provides not only quantitative information but also qualitative one. It has reach functionality that spans user session recording, heatmaps, customer surveys, collecting user feedback, and others. These features help get a profound understanding of website visitor behavior, improve user experience design, and optimize the customer journey for conversions.
Furthermore, Hotjar provides a comprehensive privacy guide that is available on their page. It ensures that user session recordings do not capture sensitive information and analyze only anonymous data.
FullStory
FullStory is an intelligent session recording software. It is an easy-to-use digital tool that points when, where, and how your visitors browse a website. FullStory is a digital experience analytics platform for on-the-fly funnels, pixel-perfect replay, custom events, heat maps, advanced search, Dev Tools, and more. Its functionality allows you to replay sessions, illuminate hidden causes of lost revenue, delve into code issues, measure web performance, and understand your opportunities from different perspectives.
While FullStory collects an unprecedented amount of experience data, we do it while holding end-user privacy preeminent.
Mouseflow
Mouseflow is one of the best website user session recording tools that help you identify the reasons why your conversions have started going down. This session tracking tools record website user interactions that enable marketers to research how an online customer journey. It shows how visitors click, move, scroll, browse, and pay attention to websites. Mouseflow also offers heatmaps to track website hotspots and friction scores. They help figure out where there is a problem on the website and improve user experience design accordingly.
Conclusion
Session recording software opens a lot of opportunities for marketing specialists, web designers, and business owners. It allows companies to research their customer experiences, detects where users face obstacles and challenges on the website, and defines what affects conversions. After detailed analysis, they can eliminate these UX and marketing mistakes much more efficiently. Session replay tools allow brands to understand their customers better and deliver more convenient and exciting online journeys to them.
