Why Session Recordings Improve Conversions - 8 Ways to Collect Them

Session recordings are the secret recipe smart marketers use to improve their conversion rate optimisations. A lethal combination when combined with heat mapping

What is Session Recording?


Session Recording is a qualitative research tool to record the browser secession of real-time website visitors. These recording sessions are used later to understand the behavioural insights of the website users. Visitor Recording permits recording all activities on a real visitor page like clicks, scrolls, window resizes, mouse movements, page changes, and form interactions. Later you can replay those interaction videos and understand accurately how the visitor interacts with the website.


In this approach, you understand client expectations, usage patterns, and difficulties and can optimize your website based on user behavior and maximize your success rate.

It offers developers the opportunity to understand the visitor's entire journeys on the website or app, including clicks, scrolls, mouse movements, and more. This recording helps evaluate and study user browsing behavior, which then helps issue fixing and optimize user experience, resulting in enhanced conversion rates.


It captures the client's exact life cycle on the website, and you can figure out which part attracts the user the most. The information allows you to make bold business decisions. You can always replay and find more in-depth and newer insights.


Benefits of Session Recordings


Understand and Empathize With Your Visitor’s  

Visitor recording software, you can put yourself in the visitor's perspective and experience how they interact with your website, which helps you develop a more productive and enjoyable user experience.

It doesn't take more; with 10-20 recordings, you can better understand where obstacles users experience on your website. The developer can understand the user-facing defects without any miscommunication. With these visitor's inputs, you can begin working with the high-priority issues. It also provides insights into how users interact with the specific elements on the website.


See How Visitor Interact With Particular Elements on Site


Visitor recording let you genuinely focus on how clients interface with crucial components on your site. You get to know where clients concentrate, in which section they spend their time most, what they click on,  what they skip. Recordings enable you to stop and replay and investigate the truthful information to roll out useful improvements in detail.


Find Defects, Bugs, Issues, Errors, And Barriers

Watching session replays will facilitate you to find where clients get stuck, puzzled, frustrated. The user experience issues fixing is the quickest approach to improve your site.

Both the Information barriers (IB)  and technical barriers (obstacles that stop customer progress) encountered by the customer can be identified, including the element defectives, Site loading issues, unclear instructions or misleading micro-copy, etc.

Discover What Makes User to Leave the Website

It is an instant opportunity to overcome the bounce rate. You can make the client stay on your website by watching session replays from clients who left your site. You can make the necessary improvements to retain the clients longer time on your website or application. You can go through the user pattern behavior, navigation issues, bugs, and make essential improvements.

Facilitate Better Decision Making (Among Team Members, Clients, and Stakeholders)

Recordings can be shared and watched easily. Provide evidence for design optimization and assist in decisions on product improvements and design enhancements. If you are a UX designer and marketer with recording, you can make a data-driven decision.

Enables More Security Through Security Logging and Monitoring

Recordings enable the business to record on-screen user activity in case it deals with sensitive information. The approach is primarily for the finance and healthcare industries. But personal data recording is not permitted; policy regulations allow only selective recording.

Rapid Problem Analysis

When users request a problematic bug that can't be recreated by the team, the support staff can ask the user to enable the recording of sessions. Even if the issue repeats, a database of error recordings helps in faster troubleshooting.

Advantages and Disadvantage of Session Recordings & Replay Tools

Today many businesses moved for visitor recording and session replay tools. Let us look into the advantages and disadvantages of this software in detail.

Advantage:

  • Able to view individual visitor sessions.
  • Illustrate the real-time interactions of users on the mobile app or a site.
  • Experiment and improve new features or site pages. For instance: see how the user responds to a new landing page or new features.
  • Find and analyze where the user is dropping off the website/app and identify the reason for the website bounce rate.
  • Able to spot where customers get stuck (e.g., cart, login page, etc.).
  • Assist in discovering and troubleshooting bugs to improve the UX.
  • Help in resolving the errors efficiently to enhance user experience.
  • Observe explicitly where clients are struck in onboarding flows. Get a better understanding and enhance onboarding procedures.

Disadvantage

  • Tricky to measure numerous individual visitor sessions.
  • Missing context. There is no direct clarification from the user visitor about their functionality.
  • Induce privacy risk for visitor data.
  • It is a time-consuming process. Complicated watch and analyze large numbers of individual visitor sessions.
  • There is no assurance that every recording will provide valuable insights.

Tools to Record User Session on Your Website / Application

Our list of the most popular visitor recording and session replay software can be implemented for your website and mobile application today.


BugReporting


Get fast website feedback from your website visitors and app users using BugReporting.

With a single click, you can integrate the code to install with your website/apps. BugReporting user record feedback, you can automatically sync the visitor recordings with your favorite work tools like Asana, Jira, Trello, and slack, etc. It also notifies the customer with an auto-notified feature when the issues are resolved.

The solution simplifies your application feedback process, and you can make better improvements from user data. Achieve product-market fit faster with user recordings.

Clients can share their feedback with voice and video on the application. It also provides auto-transcripts for developer references. It helps the team to identify and fix errors much faster than ever before.

Manage all your user recordings and customer feedback in one place. Each error is labeled and sent directly to the dashboard.  Project managers can easily assign bugs to the team members. It auto notifies the assignees and also integrates with many project management tools.  Start your 14 days free trial, and BugReporting pricing starts from $29/month to $39 / month.


Hotjar

Hotjar allows real-time recording. With the Hotjar, you can know you visualize the visitors’ behavior (including scrollings, clicks, etc.). It works with heatmaps and recordings. Heatmaps provide the user clicks, Scroll, move on the webpage. You can easily Download and share Heatmaps.

Source: https://www.hotjar.com/tour/

In recordings, you can watch what clients see on your website page. And also replay and see the visitor sessions. It has options to record all the pages and even permits to record specific pages too. For Example: To optimize particular pages like the landing page, product, shopping cart page, etc. It can be accomplished with specific page recording features.
Hotjar has a configuration to record the session longer than 30 sec. It also has some of the following features.

It has an Incoming Feedback feature where the visitors can share their instant feedback on the website or app. You can quickly identify the error and can get to know the user's likes and dislikes. I will find opportunities for your website/app improvements.


  • You can take notes while watching visitors action
  • Allows to take notes while watching user activities
  • Can tag on the video recording
  • Can shareable the videos to anyone (You can share recording with your team members)
  • Have a Filter or search option on the recording like start with, exist with, the page contains, etc.
  • You can integrate with your website by copy and pasting your unique tracking code. It supports WordPress, Magento, Shopify, LightCMS,  Joomla, Drupal, etc.
  • You can include the script on the Google Tag Manager for easy maintenance.

Hotjar has a free trial and comes with three different plans:  Personal, Business, and Agency.


Inspectlet


Inspectlet provides session recordings, dynamic heatmaps, A/B testing option( You can compare and analyze the New version page and old page). It is also an easy, automatic error tracking tool, and you can tag your sessions and users. It permits you to record 100 sessions per month for free. You can filter the recordings with many attributes that include returning or new visitors, specific page visitors, and more.


VWO

VWO provides session recordings and playback visitor sessionsVWO records all actual mouse trails, clicks, movements as visitors move across pages on the website. You view where the visitor clicks and how users move up and down on a page.

VWO has an adjustable speed; you can fast-forward and view the recordings and pause and view the required details. You may also want to skip the time frame if you undergo unuseful visitor action. Pause and Skip features save a lot of time in the analysis process.

VWO also provides custom tagging, data security, and advanced filter options. You can start your freetail, which has a lot of many features.


Smartlook


Smartlook accommodates you to record and analyze your user behavior both on the website and mobile apps. It has an automatic event tracking feature that helps to look at any individual activities on the website. Event tracking allows you to find replays of a specific interaction. You can also create a funnel and analyze its results over time, whether it’s performing well. Provides suggestions to improve conversions.


Save times by watching relevant recordings with automatic fast forward of replays. It comes in three different price plans: Startup ($31/month for 7,500 monthly sessions), Business ($79/month for 25,000 monthly sessions), and Ultimate (Custom plan).


UXtweak

UXtweak session recording tool records all user events and makes them searchable with SmartSearch filters features. SmartSearch allows you to effectively filter out visitor sessions and offer recommendations in search to save you time. On SmartSearch, you can filter out the sessions with keywords: like a mobile device from the USA, visited the contact page, clicked on the demo request button, etc.


With UXtweak, you minimize the time to analyze the visitor's data. It also has features like Activity Tracking that includes Click, Scroll, Move, and Tap Heatmaps. Implementation with Google Tag Manager with 3-clicks. With session playback, you can view the user video. With UXtweak, You can take notes, adjust playback speed, skip inactivity, and share the recording with a URL. UXtweak has four different price plans: free, enterprise, agency plan, and has a 5-day free trial on a professional plan.


Mouseflow


Mouseflow reveals why website visitors aren't converting into customers. With the help of this tool, you can record all page visitor's sessions. Heatmaps for all pages are generated automatically. Heatmapsinsignts provides details like which page section that receive most of the user attention. You can filter your data and find what you are looking for.


Mouseflow is a great tool that assists you to improve user experience and boost conversions with the needed tweaks. The recording and replay, track all the clicks, scrolls, and more. With funnels and reports, you can easily make improvements to the visitor. Forms that helps to know how the user  interact with them

Surveys permit users to share their feedback. You can integrate Mouseflow with many platforms like WordPress, Wix, Shopify, Google Analytics, HTML5, etc.


Hoverowl


Hoverowl gathers and investigates visitor recordings, provides heat map analyses, and offers website mouse tracking to optimize web pages and application features.  The tool's unique feature is the visitor timeline, which identifies useful information such as your visitors' source, location, and time on the website / mobile app.


Hoverowl pricing starts from $9/month to $99/month. The pricing differs based on the number of websites, impressions, and storage. Start your free trial for 30 days.


Conclusion


From the above discussion, you will be aware of the visitor recording importance and why it is required for your website or app. From the best visitor recording and session replay tools, choose the one that fits your business needs.  


Every tool certainly has its advantages and disadvantages. The alternative for visitor recording and session replay tools are visual customer feedback tools. Customer feedback software allows gathering user feedback from different pages. It can be integrated with different platforms with code. It is also a much more trusted approach to know your visitors.