Session Recordings: Getting the Most From Your Visitor Recording Tool

Session recordings are videos that show what internet users do during a single visit to your website, providing vital information on how people interact with your site, and showcasing how they navigate between pages - think of them as reruns of one of their browsing sessions.

As the name suggests somewhat forcefully, a recording begins when a visitor arrives at your site and starts their session, and ends when they leave.?

But, somewhat confusingly, there’s no standardized term for web visitor recording tools. They have more names than a mumble rapper and you’ll find called any of the following: customer experience analytics, digital experience analytics, in-page web analytics, mouse recordings, session playbacks, session replays, user experience replays, user recordings, user replays, user session replays, visitor behavior analytics, visitor recordings, visitor replays, visitor session replays, visual analytics, and visual session recording.

But, regardless of what you call them, session recordings are a potent tool that enables marketers, UX designers, and product developers to see their websites through the eyes of their visitors.?

Session Recordings enable you to follow the movement of a visitor’s cursor, see how far down a page they scroll, and where they navigate to.?

Some tools will even record keyboard entries, though any website analytics platform worth its salt - and we’re worth a Himalayan halite mine of the stuff - will disregard such sensitive, personally identifiable information.

Many website analytics platforms include a wide range of tools, and it can take a bit of research to understand the tasks that each feature is best for - no doubt that’s why you’re here! Session recordings are a visitor behavioral tool, meaning that they capture qualitative data about how visitors interact with your website.

This means that these videos are an effective tool for many aspects of your marketing strategy, and you’ll find a list of the work that website session recordings are most beneficial to below:

Identify Technical Website Issues

Modern front-end website development can be complicated work because of the need to create a user-friendly interface from a range of different programming building blocks that includes DOMs, HTML, CSS, and so forth - and to ensure that everything works properly on different device types, browsers, and operating systems.

Human error can also play a role; marketers often don’t have the technical skills required to identify errors on the pages they publish, and developers (the real heroes) are too expensive to be involved in every part of the process.

Given this, web session recording tools are a cheap and easy way to identify all the bugs, broken links, and glitches that can frustrate website visitors during their time on your website. And when linked to bug reporting tools and customer support tickets, they’re a great way to pinpoint what’s wrong without having to speak directly to the users.

Optimize Conversion Rates

Conversion rate optimization is the practice of increasing the proportion of users who perform a desired action on your website. Ultimately, websites exist to convert internet users into customers, and this explains why conversion rates are considered the litmus test of any company’s performance online.

Session recordings are a really effective way to understand why website visitors aren’t performing these key actions. You can see exactly what they’re doing on important pages like your homepage, signup page, or landing pages, and can use this information to make data-driven improvements accordingly.

Simplify the Onboarding Process

User onboarding is the experience that new signups have with your product or service in the immediate period after purchase or subscription, and helping them to get the most out of it so that they will love the experience, and keep coming back.?

Web session recording tools are very helpful to this work since they enable you to see how long users spend on each onboarding step, where they end the process early, and what confuses them along the way. Ultimately, it’s a great way to ensure that they fully understand the functionality of your website and to increase the customization engagement metric.

Improve Customer Support

Mass migration into the digital world means that customer support teams are more overwhelmed than ever. Internet users expect everything from product research to purchase, delivery, and post-sale support to be as easy as possible, and they want their problems resolved quickly.

However, it can be difficult for users to explain their problems in a way that your customer support team can understand. In this context, session recordings enable them to see a rerun of their browsing session, identify the issue that they are asking questions about, and use this information to resolve the issue much faster than traditional methods.

Enhance the Customer Experience

Customer experience refers to the sum total of every single interaction that a customer has with you online. This sits at the heart of every successful business; for, when done well, it means that users feel appreciated, understood, and happy at every point along their journey with your company.

The best way to analyze and improve the customer experience is to see your website from the perspective of its visitors, and session recordings are a great tool to this end. They enable designers to see what works and what doesn’t across different devices, screen resolutions, and browsers, and to make everything as easy and intuitive as possible.

How to Use Session Recordings Effectively

Session recordings are a common feature on some of the more advanced website analytics platforms that include visitor behavioral features like heatmaps, event tracking, and conversion funnels. And once you’ve set up your chosen platform, it’s a case of simply going to the session recordings part of the module, where you’ll find the generated videos waiting for you.

However, watching an endless stream of videos is a fool’s errand since they won’t teach you anything valuable unless you approach them in the right manner. As such, this section will run through the six-stage process that ensures that you will?get the most out of your website session recordings:

Establish Your Goal

Before sitting down to view your session recordings, it’s important that you identify what you want to look for. Maybe you decide to look into how users interact with important webpage elements or take a deeper dive into discrepancies that have been flagged up by other analytics tools, or even get a wider understanding of the standard journey that users take before successfully converting.

Filter Your Recordings

Once you’ve established your goal, you’ll then want to go into your website session recordings tool and categorize the videos accordingly, with the help of the filtering or segmentation feature.

A good platform like Visitor Analytics will enable you to filter the recordings by where users arrived at your site from, their geographic location, and their device/browser specifications. Further filters include whether they’re new or returning visitors, the number of pages viewed, and the duration of their session, as well as their entry and exit pages that bookend their visit.

Watch Your Recordings

Now that you have a filtered list of recordings that is most likely to provide you with the insights you need to reach your goals, you’re in a great position to start watching your generated videos. However, it’s important that you take a structured approach to this part of the process, and what this means practically is using a spreadsheet to record and organize all your findings.?

And, because it can be difficult to find session recordings that you’ve watched previously, it’s vital that you include a link to each, together with the video reference - some platforms provide a session recording ID, but others will be identifiable by the data and time of the session, as well as the user’s geographical location.

Identify Patterns of Behavior

Ultimately, and with this structured approach to session recordings, you shouldn’t have to watch more than 10-20 recordings to identify repeating patterns of user behavior. You may find that this reveals itself immediately within the videos themselves, or that it takes shape in the spreadsheet that you are building.

Create Accurate Insights into User Behavior?

Now that you’ve identified a pattern of user behavior, you can use this information to work out what needs doing to meet your established website optimization goals. Before you can do this, however, you need to work out what the pattern of user behavior actually means.

Your findings could point to anything from poor copy or a confusing navigation structure to bugs or other technical issues. Determining the exact issue at work can be the trickiest part of the process, but is best achieved by using session recording software in conjunction with other behavioral or customer feedback tools.

Create a Website Optimization Action Plan

Once you’ve identified the issues underlying unwanted patterns of user behavior, you can then use these insights to work out what improvements to carry out on your web pages. This part of the process entails simply drawing up a list of tasks and passing them to the relevant person in your team.?

And that’s it, that’s how to use website session recordings in a nutshell! Of course, optimization work is never done - websites constantly need work, customer expectations change, and new technologies enter the market that disrupt traditional designs, methods, and approaches.

As such, it’s wise to always keep one eye on your website performance statistics and to use session recording software to investigate why they’re not as high as you’d like them to be. But once you’ve followed this process and seen how powerful this tool can be, you’ll want to come back to these videos again and again!

_______________________

?? You can read the rest of this article at: https://www.visitor-analytics.io/en/resources/what-are-session-recordings/