The Complete Guide to Using Website Session Recordings
Aug 8, 2024
Published by: Maren Rapp
Imagine your website as a physical store. As customers browse, you observe their actions and reactions—perhaps someone grimaces at a fragrance or beams while sinking into a plush chair. Occasionally, you engage with them, asking, “Do you need help finding anything?”
In e-commerce, how can we replicate these insights into user behavior to drive sales? This is where session recordings come into play.
A combination of tools, including session recording software, serves as a guide. Sessions are crucial for capturing genuine user interactions, enabling businesses to understand visitor behavior, identify pain points, and make informed decisions that enhance user experience and boost conversions.
What Are Sessions?
Sessions, often referred to as session recordings or session playback, are video replays that capture user interactions on your website.
They document visitor actions, allowing you to observe precisely how users navigate your site, including clicks, scrolls and mouse movements. This detailed perspective on behavior helps uncover usability challenges and provides insight into the customer journey.
The Key Benefits of Sessions:
1. Easily observe customer behavior
Observe how visitors navigate your site, where they linger, and where they encounter difficulties or drop off with sessions.
How are visitors interacting with elements like a CTA button or form? Session recordings show this in real-time.
Capturing complete user journeys with session recording tools is crucial to understand why users are behaving in a certain way on your website. Pinpoint areas of friction or confusion by identifying the areas that may be hurting conversion rates and use these insights to proactively optimize your website’s design and functionality.
Example: An e-commerce business notices a high rate of customers abandoning their cart after checkout. After watching recordings, they identify that many users struggle with form errors and unclear instructions on the payment page. The business simplifies the payment form and adds helpful tooltips to guide users, which decreases cart abandonment and leads to a smoother user experience and increased conversions.
2. Assess new features/designs with usability testing
By conducting usability tests using Lucky Orange, you can gain valuable insights into user behavior with these elements in real-world scenarios. Plus, it allows you to implement new features or design with confidence knowing that the new features have been thoroughly vetted by actual users.
Like putting a spark out before it starts a wildfire, usability testing serves as a preemptive measure to identify and rectify potential issues before they escalate into widespread problems.
By watching interactions through session replays, it’s easy to spot common usability issues and address them through interactive design improvements.
Example: A software company wants to test the usability of a new website feature. Using session recordings, they identify that users struggle to find the new feature due to its location on the page. With this insight in hand, the company repositions the feature to a more prominent location and confirms that users now engage at a higher rate.
3. Bug Detection
Identify a wide range of technical issues that may otherwise go unnoticed.
Example: You observe instances where users encounter error messages when submitting a form. Armed with this insight, developers can prioritize a bug fix so the form delivers a smoother experience. The ability to watch recordings of user behavior is crucial for identifying and resolving these technical issues effectively—with proof of the bug playing out in the real world.
4. Improved Decision Making
With real data and user recordings at your fingertips, you’ll know exactly how to design your site based on user interaction.
Example: A salon business sees session recordings showing users getting stuck on the date selector step of their online booking form. Many users click back and forth between the calendar and other fields. The salon identifies the date picker might be unintuitive or not displaying available dates clearly on certain browsers or devices.
The salon implements a test by replacing the existing date picker with a more user-friendly version that highlights available dates and provides tooltips for additional information. Now, while watching sessions, they see reduced hesitation and confusion at the date selection step.
Being able to know what to test and fully judge if that test variation performs better is a key feature of sessions.
Plus, a session recording can easily be shared with team members, clients and stakeholders, giving everyone a front-row seat to the user experiences. Engage with your team to brainstorm new ideas and areas of improvement.
How should I analyze session recordings?
While you will start to pick up common patterns and behaviors, it’s good to know what to look for. A few things we suggest keeping in the back of your mind after clicking play are:
Navigation paths: common entry and exit points
Click patterns: What buttons, links, images and non-clickable elements are users focused on
Scrolling behavior: Analyze how far users scroll down on pages. Is content being missed because it’s located too far down on the page? Following mouse movements is a powerful benefit of session replay.
Rage Clicks: Look for instances where users repeatedly click on the same element without anything happening on the page—which can indicate frustration or a broken link. This happens a lot on logos and trust icons that visitors think should be linked.
Multi-Page Interactions: Observe how users move through multiple pages in a single session to understand their journey
Using segmentation to find important visitor sessions
Having an obvious starting point makes website analysis a whole lot easier. Lucky Orange Optimizable Segments give users the perfect entry point to identify patterns in visitor behavior and take actionable steps to improve user experience.
Optimizable Segments are pre-loaded into your Lucky Orange account and represent groups of visitors we believe you should be monitoring—becuase they likely have optimization opportunity.
Example: Let’s say you want to focus on Frustrated Visitors after noticing a recent drop in last month's revenue. After watching some recordings within that Optimizable Segment, you identify common barriers preventing sign-up such as confusing navigation, unclear CTAs or overwhelming content.
With these insights, you take steps to simplify navigation, highlight trial sign-up CTAs and optimize content.
In addition to frustrated visitors you can also segment your users based on new vs returning, device type, location, traffic source, specific pages, behavioral segments (engagement level, page views), referral URLs and many other customizable filters.
Tool Tip: Live view is great to see real-time behavior from visitors. Whether it’s spotting trends or troubleshooting problems, live view ensures you are one step ahead. Plus, if you notice a user struggling, open the “chat” feature to assist, support and guide confused visitors.
Using Lucky Orange Discovery to Easily Segment Audiences
Still confused on where to focus your attention? We recently released Lucky Orange Discovery, which helps you find optimization opportunities tied to specific parts of the customer's journey.
With this feature, find answers to your most pressing website questions in a simple way. Aftering selecting an optimization opportunity you want to learn more about, a natural language prompt will tell you exactly the types of people it will show and take you to the right spot in the site to learn more. Learn more in the video below.
How to benefit from sessions in your role
By utilizing sessions, each department within a business can gain valuable information specific to their goals, ultimately leading to website optimization. How will sessions benefit you in your specific role?
1. Marketing
Campaign Analysis: Evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by using session replay software to track a user's interaction with landing pages and promotional content
Content Optimization: Understand which blog posts, videos, or infographics engage user the most and adjust content strategies accordingly
User Segmentation: Identify behavior patterns of different user segments to tailor marketing efforts
2. Sales
Lead Qualification: Analyze the behavior of potential leads on your site to better understand their interests and readiness to purchase
Sales Funnel Optimization: Identify drop-off points in the sales funnel and optimize the user journey
Personalized outreach: Use insights from a session recording to personalize sales pitches and follow-up emails based on observed user interests and behaviors.
3. Customer Service
Issue Identification: Detect common issues or pain points users face, allowing the customer service team to proactively address these problems
Improved support: Use recording to train customer service representatives by showing real examples of user difficulties and hope to resolve them
4. Product Development
Feature Testing: See how users interact with new features and gather feedback to make necessary adjustments
Usability Improvements: Identify usability issues and prioritize them in development roadmap
5. UX/UI Design
Design validation: validate design changes by observing how users interact with different elements on the site
A/B Testing: Conduct A/B tests and use session recordings to analyze which design variation perform better
How different business types benefit from user sessions
1. E-commerce
Cart Abandonment Analysis: Identify common points of friction or confusion in the checkout process, like unexpected shipping costs or complicated forms to make necessary adjustments to improve conversion rates. Watching session replays can help identify these points of friction.
Journey mapping: See a business map of the typical user journey from landing on the site to completing a purchase. Seeing users interact across multiple pages will help ecommerce brands identify opportunities to streamline navigation to drive more conversions.
2. B2B
Lead Generation: Gain insights into the behavior of leads by tracking those who fill out contact forms or engage with specific content related to products or services. Then, identify patterns that indicate strong leads to help prioritize follow-up efforts.
Content Engagement: Watch recordings from content pages (blogs, whitepapers, etc) to understand what topics and formats resonate with the targeted audience.
3. Agency
Client support: Use live chat feature to provide real-time support and training to clients. This proactive approach helps strengthen client relationships and demonstrate the value of the agency’s expertise.
Use Session recordings with other Lucky Orange tools
One thing about our tools is they’re all team players. Think of a hammer and nails. While each can function independently, when used together, they make the process of building or fixing things much easier and more effective.
Using session recordings with heatmaps
Using session recordings in tandem with Lucky Orange Dynamic Heatmaps will unlock a powerful workflow in Lucky Orange.
Both analytics tools feature buttons allow seamless navigation between them. We recommend starting with heatmaps to grasp the border picture of page activity. Analyze heatmaps to detect any issues in user interaction such as clicks or scrolls, indicating potential areas for improvement.
One identified, delves into session recording of visitors on those pages to understand the underlying causes of these issues in the visitor journey.
Example: While viewing a Dynamic Heatmap for your home page, you notice a group of clicks on an element that isn’t designed to be clicked. You also notice your main call-to-action has very few clicks. Jump straight into a session recording for visitors on your homepage to see what happens when they’re on that section of the page. What’s causing them to be distracted away from the CTA?
Using session replays with Lucky Orange Conversion Funnels
A Lucky Orange Conversion Funnel tracks visitor journeys around your website, highlighting where people abandon the funnel. Simply identify a series of steps that lead to a desired outcome, typically corresponding to pages or actions on the website.
With funnels, further research is required to dig into what’s causing the results you see. Within these funnels, you’re able to access session replays for visitors who completed the funnel or those who fell short.
Example: For Sarah’s online clothing store she creates a funnel to track the steps users take from adding items to their cart to completing the purchase.
The funnel includes these steps:
Viewing product pages
Adding items to the cart
Proceeding to the checkout page
Completing the purchase
Then, Sarah regions analyze sessions of users who enter the funnel but don’t complete the purchase. She sees a trend of users dropping off after adding items to their cart, identifying common issues such as lengthy checkout forms.
Using user session recordings alongside Lucky Orange Surveys
Polls and surveys allow users to gather qualitative feedback directly from the website visitors presenting questions or prompts at strategic points in the customer journey. Session Recordings can complement poll and survey data by providing context to visitor response.
Example: If a survey indicates dissatisfaction with the checkout process, session recordings can reveal exactly where users encounter difficulties or confusion, helping prioritize areas to improve. This direct communication with visitors is the BEST way to learn what's working, what's not working and what words people use to describe their issues and needs.
Using Form Analytics in combination with session recordings
Lucky Orange Form Analytics offers detailed insights into how users interact with online forms, including completion rates, time spent on each field, and abandonment rates.
To take things a step further, session replays can provide context to form analytics by showing real user interactions with forms. Maybe you want to watch a session replay where visitors struggle with form submissions to help identify pain points that may not be evident from the analytics alone.
Session Recording Fast Facts
Before we end this post, here's a group of the most common questions we get about using Lucky Orange session recordings.
Is it legal to record user sessions on my website?
Yes. As a service provider and data processor, our tools are fully CCPA and GDPR compliant.
We only provide the data you need to analyze visitor behavior without sending or storing sensitive information.
Do sessions capture sensitive information, like credit card numbers?
No, Lucky Orange automatically masks or excludes sensitive information from session recordings to ensure user privacy and data security.
How are session recordings stored? Are there limits on the amount of data that can be stored?
Sessions recordings are typically stored for a specific period, which can be customized based on your preferences. Older recording may be automatically deleted to manage storage space. You may upgrade to a longer storage period at any time.
Sessions are securely stored on Lucky Orange’s servers, which employ industry-standard security measures.
Who has access to session recordings? Can I control access permission for different team members?
You can control access to sessions by assigning specific permissions to team members within your Lucky Orange dashboard.
Are there any annotation or bookmarking features to mark key moments for later reference?
Yes. The “Notes” section can be used to add text comments to highlight important moments or issues. You may also "star" a visitor to note them as important and make it easier to find them when you return to the app later.
Can I change the playback speed of my Sessions?
Yes. Use the gear button at the bottom right hand corner of the recording. This will allow you to adjust the speed of the video and change other preferences.
Other questions? We're always here to help at support@luckyorange.com.
