What are session replay analytics?
When we use the term session replay analytics, what we mean is the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting user session data (i.e., what actual users are doing when visiting your website or interacting with your application).
The collection of this data involves complex technology that protects sensitive data and user privacy along the way. That means that rather than a recording of what people are doing on your website, session replays are a reconstruction of an actual user session based on events (user actions, like clicks and mouse movements) that occur during that session. They do so using a Document Object Model (DOM), which allows you to capture changes to a website or app and rebuild the user session.
By way of analogy, let’s say you take notes on exactly where a basketball player moves during an offensive possession. Later, you can reconstruct those movements and understand the play — you don’t need a video recording of the game to rebuild what happened.
Also, because your session replay is based on events, there are a series of metrics that you can combine when building your higher-level analysis. These metrics include:
Session duration
As is pretty obvious from the name, this metric tracks how long a user engaged with your web page or app. From the perspective of a content manager, for example, a longer session duration when interacting with blog content would be a positive indication that the visitor liked or found value in the content.
Click rate
This metric measures how often users click on specific elements or areas during their session. It shows the frequency or percentage of clicks a particular button, link, or interactive element receives relative to the total number of users who view or interact with that page.
Scroll depth
The scroll depth is a vertical measure of how far a user scrolls down a web page or within an app during a session. For example, if a page has a scroll depth of 30%, it means that, on average, people are only viewing the top 30% of the page. Similar to session duration, this can be an indicator of interest in the content, poor digital experience, or highlight an issue of content visibility.
Form abandonment rate
Again, this is fairly self-explanatory, but this metric measures the frequency with which users abandon a form rather than finishing and submitting it. For obvious reasons, you want more people to submit their completed forms (you’re welcome!).
Conversion funnels and drop-off points
A conversion funnel represents the journey a user takes through various steps or stages on a website or app, with the goal of achieving a desired outcome, such as:
- Completing a purchase
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Filling out a contact form
- Downloading an app or resource
The funnel is called such because many users enter at the top (start the journey), but fewer complete the intended action at the bottom (conversion).
Drop-off points are the points at which users stop moving down the funnel (like abandoning a form before completing it). This can be the result of a poor customer experience, like slow load times, or a confusing user interface (UI).
Error clicks
Error clicks reveal issues with functionality by exposing clicks where there is an unexpected outcome. This helps with debugging and resolving these issues greatly improves the customer experience.
Dead clicks
Unlike error clicks, dead clicks are more indicative of confusing UI — that’s because dead clicks are clicks on non-interactive elements on your web pages or in your application (for example: A visitor clicks on a static image or block of text on your site).
Rage clicks
Another click metric is rage clicks — these user interactions can help you get a deeper understanding of frustration or pain points associated with the UI. In essence, they’re defined by a series of rapid clicks on a single item or in a single area, just like you’d do if you were annoyed that something wasn’t working properly or was taking too long.
How session replays work
Generally, session replays work by reconstructing entire user sessions based on their interactions with your website, product, or mobile app, as outlined above.
The difference with Sprig Replays is that you can use demographic data and triggers to target specific points along the customer journey, allowing you to get to what matters faster and save time and effort going over hours of footage.
Add to that Sprig’s AI Analysis, which instantly derives insights from your data and groups your clips based on themes within your Sprig dashboard. Rather than sifting through hours of session playback manually, you can immediately pull actionable insights about user behavior, new features, A/B testing, or usability issues thanks to Sprig AI.
Capture clips of users' web and mobile experiences — Sprig AI will instantly analyze and group those clips to uncover patterns in your users' behavior. What you can learn from session replays
Watching session replays offers product managers a detailed and real-time understanding of how real users interact with a website or app, providing insights that go beyond raw data or analytics.
Here’s what product managers can learn and the benefits of watching these replays:
Visualize the user experience
There’s no better way to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior than by seeing exactly what they do when interacting with your product. This raw data can be analyzed in any number of ways and complement more qualitative data like surveys to paint a clearer picture of both actions and intent.
Analyze the user journey
As you review session replays, you can discover themes and patterns that may reveal underlying issues or suggest ways to further optimize your product. For example, if you’re seeing pauses or lots of scrolling before taking a desired action, it could indicate that users are having trouble finding important features.
Validate new features and hypotheses
Every hypothesis needs to be tested, and session replays allow you to see exactly how your product works in the wild, making them great for UX research. Replays are also a great way to validate new features by running things like A/B tests to determine which layout, content, or design performs best.
Spot and address points of friction
Sprig Replay and Sprig AI are fantastic tools for customer support teams. Pair your Sprig Replays with heatmaps, and Sprig’s AI Analytics tools can help you quickly diagnose any usability issues, drop offs, or friction points along the customer journey — all while protecting sensitive information.
Improve conversion rates
Thanks to experience analytics, like the form abandonment rate and other user data points outlined above, session replays help you improve conversion rates by identifying issues and offering key insights that drive better engagement and retention.
Replicate and solve bugs
Once again, support teams are an excellent use case for session replays, as they help customer support see exactly what a real user is experiencing, making it easier to quickly replicate the issues and squash bugs with your developer team.
And, because of the targeted nature of Sprig Replays, you can use filters based on user actions to trigger events, reducing drag on engineering.
How to analyze session replays
We’ve established what session replays are, how they work, and why they’re great for product managers and customer support teams (and... everyone else, including your customers) — but how do you go about analyzing them?
As we’ve discussed, making the most of your session replays requires a combination of both knowing what you’re looking for and how you’d like to use that information.
Here’s how to get started analyzing session replays.
1. Decide what to analyze
Ok, you might be saying, “well, duh.” But it’s really important and there is some subtlety to it. For example, you might have noticed some strange numbers in your product analytics — analyzing your session replays may be a reaction to something that you’re observing but want to understand better.
Or, you might have a new product that you’re launching — how well is it being received? Session replays let you know exactly how real users are engaging with it.
2. Collect relevant data
This is where it gets fun. To use Sprig Replays, just go to your dashboard and select ‘New Replay’. Then, you can set up all the details, including where in your product your session recordings will take place, what triggers you want to initiate recording, how long your replay duration should be, and much more. Here’s a video tutorial on How to launch a Replay using Sprig.
Record specific clips of users’ web and mobile experience based on their unique attributes and in-product actions.3. Review replays and look for patterns
Once your Sprig Replays are up and running, you can click into and view any replay by navigating to your Studies page. (You can also filter your results using user attributes.)
As you’re going through your replays, you can easily share clips with your team, and use the time-stamp link to make sure you’re sharing the most relevant moments within your clips.
At the same time, Sprig’s AI Analytics integration will be helping by identifying themes and creating groups of clips automatically, helping you spot patterns faster.
Sprig AI instantly analyzes Replay clips and organizes them into groups to uncover hidden patterns in your users’ product behavior.4. Act on the data
Now that you’ve got the data, you can act on it! You’ve taken the guesswork out of making changes, and instead can make data-driven decisions to improve your digital experience, whether it’s inside an app or on a marketing landing page.
Let’s say you’ve got a high bounce rate on a landing page — you’ve identified mouse movements that indicate confusion, and you’ve tied your replay to a heatmap that shows that people aren’t finding your CTA.
With that in mind, you can focus on conversion rate optimization in your next round of designs, and directly address the issue at hand.
5. Evaluate the results
Of course, it doesn’t end there. While you may have a hypothesis for how to improve the user experience, it’s important to validate and test to make sure you’ve solved the problem, or that the benefit of your changes is showing up in the data.
How to use session replay analytics at scale
Analyzing your individual session replays is important as a product manager, but how can you use them at scale to inform product decisions and optimization?
Sprig’s AI Analysis was built with exactly this in mind.
Identify patterns and trends
As soon as you launch your Sprig Replays, Sprig’s AI begins to analyze the results in real time, grouping your clips by theme, and making it easy to quickly identify patterns and trends in the user data.
Address issues proactively
Because you’ve got Sprig’s AI Analysis working for you, you can take action quicker and leverage the insights from your replays to proactively build solutions.
You can be more nimble without sacrificing detail, since you can validate findings with individual session replays, and share exact moments easily with all stakeholders.
Make data-driven decisions
With Sprig Replays, you can be confident that you’re making decisions based on real user data, and thanks to Sprig’s AI Analytics, what may once have been too much information is now your greatest asset.
By scaling your ability to analyze the data, you can understand macro trends much faster, and drive faster innovation.
How GoFormz used session replays to analyze product launches
While GoFormz — an online provider of digital forms — had long used Sprig surveys to help gauge customer sentiment regarding new products, they revolutionized their product release process with Sprig Replays.
Because of the granular targeting possible when building Replays, GoFormz could get immediate feedback on UX and UI changes that they could use to address any issues or improve their results.
Sprig Replays cut down on the drag that longer session recordings can create, and were able to reduce A/B testing overall thanks to the real user data that quickly revealed whether their updates were serving their customers.
Read the full case study here.
Scale your ability to use your session replay data
Session replay is an invaluable tool when building any product. But it can also be overwhelming and unmanageable unless you use the right approach.
Sprig Replays give you the best of both worlds: The granular data from individual user sessions that you can build to target specific actions and even demographics; and the 30,000-foot view that Sprig’s AI Analytics offer, scaling your ability to leverage the data to drive more informed decision making.
Sign up for Sprig today and improve your understanding of your customers while also enhancing internal collaboration across your whole team.
Frequently asked questions about session replay analytics
How do I track user experience?
Tracking user experience involves gathering both quantitative and qualitative data about how users interact with your website or app. Session replay tools provide one of the most effective ways to track user experience by allowing you to visually observe and analyze actual user behavior in real time.
Here's how you can do it:
Session recordings: Watch replays of individual user sessions to see exactly how users navigate your site, where they click, how they scroll, and where they encounter problems.
Click and scroll heatmaps: Use heatmaps to visualize where users are clicking (click heatmaps) and how far they are scrolling (scrollmaps). This helps identify which areas of your site are engaging and where users lose interest.
Conversion funnels: Set up and monitor funnels that represent critical user flows (e.g., from landing on a product page to completing a purchase) and analyze where users drop off.
Error tracking: Identify errors users encounter, such as form validation issues or broken elements, and see how these errors impact user experience.
Behavioral analysis: Analyze user behaviors such as rage clicks (repeated clicking on a non-responsive element) or hesitations, which can indicate frustration or confusion.
Who can benefit from session replay analytics?
Session replay analytics can benefit a wide range of teams across various roles and industries, including:
Product Managers: Gain insight into how users interact with features, identify friction points, and optimize product flows to improve usability, sentiment, adoption, and other key product KPIs.
User Researchers: Quickly collect and analyze user behavior insights at scale to drive data-backed product decisions that enhance the user experience.
UX/UI Designers: Understand where users struggle with interface elements, uncover usability issues, and refine design decisions based on real user behavior.
Marketing Teams: See how users engage with landing pages, forms, and CTAs, and use this data to improve conversion rates and lead generation efforts.
Customer Support: Watch replays of sessions where users encountered problems to understand the context behind their support requests, making it easier to troubleshoot issues and improve response times.
Developers: Detect bugs or technical issues that users face, such as errors or broken elements, by watching how users interact with the product and identifying what went wrong.
eCommerce Managers: Track customer journeys, identify where customers drop out of checkout funnels, and optimize product pages to improve sales and reduce cart abandonment.
Growth and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) Teams: Use session replays to identify barriers to conversion, analyze user flows, and implement data-driven changes to improve engagement and sales.
What are the challenges of collecting session replay analytics?
While session replay analytics offer significant insights, there are some challenges associated with collecting and using this data:
- Data privacy and compliance: Session replays capture detailed user interactions, so it’s essential to anonymize sensitive data (such as personal details or payment information) to stay compliant with data privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA.
- Handling large data volumes: Collecting session replays generates large amounts of data, which can be resource-intensive to store and analyze. Teams need efficient data storage solutions and tools to sift through the data and focus on the most relevant sessions.
- Filtering noise: Not all user sessions are equally valuable, and watching replays for every single session can be time-consuming. The challenge is filtering through sessions to find those that provide actionable insights, such as sessions with high-value users or those involving critical errors. Sprig Replays can be a game changer here by using the targeted, clip-based approach versus recording entire user sessions, as well as AI-generated reviews and thematic grouping of clip content.
- Interpretation: While replays provide a visual representation of user behavior, interpreting the data requires a good understanding of UX principles, product flows, and technical troubleshooting. It’s important to combine session replay analytics with other metrics (such as conversion rates and user feedback) for a holistic analysis.
- Performance impact: Depending on the tool and how it’s implemented, recording user sessions could potentially affect website or app performance. It's important to choose tools that minimize performance impact on the end-user experience.
- Focusing on key insights: With so much data available, the challenge lies in identifying which insights are actionable and relevant. It can be easy to get caught up in minor user behaviors that don’t necessarily lead to significant improvements.
Despite these challenges, the benefits of session replay analytics often outweigh the difficulties when used effectively and responsibly.