Using Session Recordings to Evaluate Campaign Performance

Have you ever wondered if the traffic you're getting from your paid ad campaigns on Instagram, Facebook or Google is valuable?

Do you know if your ads are targeting quality visitors who come to your site and stick around long enough to convert?

Session recordings give you a front-row seat for visitor behavior. By following the strategies laid out below, you'll be able to identify recordings that show the behavior you're hoping to track within the audience you care about most.

• Use the Lucky Orange recordings listing to see traffic coming from various ad campaigns

• Find the most valuable website traffic coming from these campaigns

• Use session recordings to see which traffic source yields the most engaged visitors

Finding campaign traffic within Session Recordings

Choose the date range you want to evaluate

Start by logging in to Lucky Orange and go to the recordings tab. Use the date range selection to pick the timeframe you want to review.

Use UTM parameters to sort by campaign

If you’re asking yourself what a UTM parameter is, take a minute to read this great blog post on different ways you can keep tabs on the traffic your various marketing campaigns drive to your website.

Once you’re using UTM parameters, you can sort recordings in Lucky Orange by the various campaigns.

This will let you see traffic coming from specific sources like Instagram, Facebook, Google PPC, Bing, and more if you’re using the source attribute within your links. You can also sort further by UTM medium (e.g. social), UTM campaign (e.g. clearance_2023) and UTM terms (e.g. coats).

Typically traffic from something like organic search engines won't have a UTM parameter but will be tracked in other ways.

Narrow your search to a specific campaign

If you want to see recordings from only a specific campaign, type referrer.utm_campaign=[campaign name] into the Filter By Tags dialogue box.

You can also narrow recordings by using other UTM parameters. Try filtering by tags using referrer.utm_source=[source], referrer.utm_medium=[medium] or referrer.utm_term=[term].

What to look for in session recording behavior

Analyze people with high/low time on site

Just like high-activity visitors, recordings from people who spent a lot of time on your site are likely to be the most valuable to review for user experience insights.

When a person spends a long time on your site it could mean you’re moving them through your product or content flow in a way that deeply engages them encourages movement through multiple parts of your site. Or, on the other hand, it could mean they’re struggling to find what they need and are spending time going from page to page to find what they need.

Visitors showing both types of behavior are good to review. If you’ve found a highly engaged visitor who ultimately converts, make note of what that person is engaging with and what they’re doing (or not doing) compared to other visitors.

If you’ve found a visitor who seems to be going from page to page but leaves without converting, see if they ran into any technical issues, if they were using the search bar more than your website navigation or if they’re referring to FAQs, help documents or Contact Us sections more often than other users.

If you see visitors who had a high amount of activity but left your site without sticking around for long and not converting, that could mean the campaign that brought them to your site wasn’t relevant to the landing page they came to when they first visited your site.

They might be frustrated because they didn’t quickly see what they were looking for. Conversely, a short visit that converts might mean your campaign is very well targeted and your site navigation helped them quickly find what they needed.

Evaluate low and high-value traffic equally

Traffic that gets to your site then immediately bounces isn’t worth the cost per click. Revisit your ad targeting or reduce your bids to reduce traffic that bounces without converting. If you continue to see traffic with high bounce rates after making these changes, ask for a refund or ad credits, or stop the campaign altogether.

A few notes

Look for the products they’re spending the most time on or the content they’re reading to see if you can spot patterns that help you refine your ad campaigns.

See lots of visitors reading a specific blog post? Maybe you can use keywords from that blog post for your next PPC campaign. Is there a specific product that everyone from your ad campaign gravitates toward?

Try promoting that product on different platforms to see if the product has a universal appeal.

Conclusion

Getting the maximum return on investment for your paid marketing efforts is vital to long-term business success. By adding Session Recordings to your analysis you give yourself powerful insights that may otherwise go undiscovered.

So, log in to Lucky Orange and let us know if we can help in any way.