How Can Session Recording Show What Your Users See?

First off, let us explain what this Session Recording we are talking about here is. We are talking about a web analytics tool that can help you understand your website visitors better. How? Well, it allows you to record their whole journey on your website, from start to finish. 

What makes it such a powerful tool is the fact that you don’t need to ask your audience. A lot of your questions will be answered right when you watch the session recording. You can see exactly where users clicked, how much they revealed of your content and how far they got in your sales funnel. 

By watching it, you can understand how users feel about your website on a deeper level. This can help you come up with ideas on how to improve your site and thus ensure a higher conversion rate. 

Improving User Experience Based on Session Recordings

Session replay (or recording) was huge when it first emerged among online entrepreneurs, and it still is. The main goal was to take a look at how people interact with the website while they proceed in the sales funnel. Online business success largely depends on how well the sales funnel is optimized. 

It is not that you can’t reveal most of the conversion rate problems with quantitative data. While you might be well-aware of the issues that hinder your CRO, you still don’t know the “why” behind them. This is where session replay enters the picture. 

By recording session replays and watching them, you gain the following benefits:

• You understand the flaws in your content that cause users to leave
• Bugs and layout flaws can be also revealed easily with session recordings
• It helps you identify when and why users abandon the sales funnel
• It makes you able to understand the user experience by following every step of the user journey

As an online entrepreneur, it is hard to imagine how users are experiencing your website. You simply can’t detach yourself and take a look at it with the customer’s state of mind. This is why session recordings are so valuable, as they let you take a look at your own website from a different standpoint. 

This is invaluable knowledge that can help you improve your website one iteration after the other.  

How to Use Session Recordings like a Pro

Below, we are going to show you the main methods that will come in handy on your CRO journey. Session Replay is one of those tools that can bring a lot of value to your online business if used the right way. On top of that, it is not even hard to use it. 

The hard part is to ask the right questions before you take a look at any of your session recordings. Then, if you look closely enough, the answer will be right in front of your eyes. 

1. Identify the Most Pressing Issue

More often than not, the biggest issue online entrepreneurs struggle with is that they have a high bounce rate. Now, you can go ahead and watch all the session recordings you have at hand but that probably won’t help. 

The point is not to watch them all, but to watch those that can clearly reveal the issue. In the case of bounce rates, you should only watch those recordings where the user left at a certain point in your sales funnel. This way, you can quickly find out why your users don’t convert and what to do about it. 

Take a look at the interactions that users perform before they leave. Which are those elements that cause a drop-off on the page? At which point do users decide to leave? You can identify the causes by looking at the whole journey from start to finish. 

Here are some additional things you can find out with session replay:

• Errors and bugs that cause users to get stuck
• Confusing elements and content where the user does not understand what to do next
• Web pages that the user visited before and after leaving
• Websites, platforms or ads that users clicked on before visiting your page

2. Start with the Most Pressing Issues on Your Site

After watching your session recordings, you end up with a list of issues that cause people to bounce. You need to rearrange that list based on priority and start working on the most pressing issue first. Identify the main problem that does the most damage to your revenue or to the overall user experience.

Then, continue watching recordings with that particular problem in mind and start coming up with solutions. A lot of diagnostic data can be derived with a good session recording tool. The third step is to take a segmented approach and follow the issue that way, preventing it from reoccurring in the future. 

3. Improve User Experience with Session Recordings

Put yourself in the user’s shoes and figure out which improvements have to be made in order to guarantee a more enjoyable user experience. You can get more information out of a session recording than by asking people directly.

Why? Because most people are not website developers and they don’t know exactly what is going on. Don’t get me wrong. Asking for feedback can be incredibly valuable. However, you are rarely going to get a precise opinion out of your users, pointing out several issues. 

With session recordings, you can re-watch exactly where they clicked and what happened after that. You can also see how far they got in your article and whether they even reached your CTA or not. A video recording can talk a thousand words without anyone speaking. 

Identify those points when users get confused and decide to leave. Then, try to come up with solutions and figure out how to implement them. Create different versions of the same web page if necessary and perform some A/B testing in order to find out which one works best. 

4. Add, Remove and Change Elements based on Session Replay

If you have just added a new element to your website and you are interested how it performs, then go ahead and look at a few session replays. When you come up with a great idea for an element, it does not necessarily mean that your users are going to like it as well. 

While watching some recordings, you might find out that parts of your web page are buggy, confusing or simply not interesting enough. When such elements or pieces of content cause your readers to leave, it is important to identify that element. 

You could find it by asking your customers, yet an even faster method is to just look at some session recordings. Once you are familiar with the typical user route in your sales funnel, you can start optimizing problematic elements on your website. 

The goal is to make your audience perform the actions you want them to. The whole page has to be interesting, on-point, helpful and user-friendly. Keep in mind that people hate it when a website is all about selling and “Buy Now!” buttons. 

This is How You Record Sessions

Session recording is web analytics software that you need to buy or subscribe to in order to use it. Such service comes with plenty of features that can help you collect valuable data. It is cost-effective and time-effective as well. You only need some traffic to work with and some time until enough sessions have been recorded. 

As long as the session recorder is on, it is going to save the whole user journey in a video format. Then, you can open those videos up any time you want to and start watching. You can take a look at how users interact with your website on various devices and browsers. 

And it is all legal, as you are not violating anyone’s privacy by doing it. Session replay can open you the door to high-level conversion rate optimization that is going to help your business prosper. 

Final Words

As you can see, using session recording software is really not that big of a deal. While it is not hard to use it, it is going to be your job to interpret that information the right way. This is why it is important to watch recordings with a goal in mind. 

Make sure to target those websites that have a high bounce rate or a low conversion rate. It is hard to tell what might be the issue but by looking at the recordings, all those issues will reveal themselves. Session recording has proven that you don’t need to ask your audience if you want to understand them. 

You can just watch them as they browse through your website and draw conclusions that way. This is a tool that is not going to lose its value, as websites can always be improved. Once the biggest issues are fixed, you can always continue by setting smaller goals and improving your site little-by-little every day.

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