What is Session Recording?
Session recording is a process in which website or mobile App visitors browsing behavior is captured, stored, and viewed back at a later time. You can identify a user’s entire journey on your website or app using session recording tools, like clicks, mouse movements, scrolls, etc. You can remember the user’s entire browsing journey from the recorded session and identify friction areas to optimize the user experience and ultimately increase the conversion rate. It also helps to visually determine where the user drops from your marketing or sales funnel from the session recording. The data collected from the session recordings are used to run Machine Learning models to predict when users click the buy button and abandon the site.
What are the use cases for Session Recording?
Following are some of the use cases companies can use session recording tools:
- Identifying mobile-specific issue that doesn’t exhibit on desktop
- UX issue that occurs only on specific browsers and OS versions
- Visualizing user click streams through heatmaps identifies where users spend more time and where they spend less time. This page-specific insight gives you to improve user experience and increase conversion rate.
- Try out new features for a specific set of users and collect user data to analyze if the users like them or not.
What are the top website recording tools?
1. Fullstory
Fullstory offers session recording tools and other tools for heatmaps, A/B testing, etc. Using the data collected from Fullstory tools, you can perform both quantitative and qualitative analysis to improve your website visitors’ browsing experience. The easy-to-use UI helps you visually identify visitors’ pain points, using which you can uncover new opportunities to improve your website conversion rate.
Fullstory offers a 14-day free trial, and you can register and test it for your website before making a total commitment.
2. Hotjar
Using Hotjar you can visualize user engagement on your website. It records all the user actions on your website using a recording tool and displays a visual heatmap of user clicks. Using the visual click data captured, you can identify which part of the website users engage the most and where they’re not engaging with your website.
Hotjar also offers tools for creating sales funnels and survey templates to analyze and understand your users browsing insights.
3. Mouseflow
Mouseflow tool records all the user clicks and has a Friction Score feature that shows which user session has issues. You can go to particular user playback instead of wasting time analyzing all the user sessions. You can create cohorts (groups) to combine similar user sessions and perform collective user behavior analysis on the session data. Like other tools, Mouseflow has tools for heatmaps, form analytics, and funnels. Combining all these tools with the user session data, you can gain 360 degrees of your user journey on your website.
Mouse flow offers a free tier that gives you life-long access to their tools. Using the free tier you can record and playback 500 user sessions for one website for a month of session recording storage.
4. SiteRecording
SiteRecording tool captures all your website user journey and stores it for later playback. Its visual dashboard gives valuable behavioral data like which geography the users visited, what pages they visited, how long they stayed on the page, etc. Using the visual graphs, you can identify user patten, determine their interests, and makes you make decisions based on the actual data collected from the session recording tool.
SiteRecording offers free registration for ten users, you can register and start using the tool immediately.
5. Smartlook
Smartlook session capture and playback tool support both website and app; its advanced filtering capability allows you to move to crucial movements during playback of the user session. You can create filters based on various parameters like location, device, URL, etc. this feature helps reduce your playback viewing time.
Smartlook supports free tire with a maximum of 1500 session recordings per month, using which you can test how the tool works before paying for the tool.
6. Livesession
Livesession tool has features to capture user session recording and playback. Its heatmap feature allows you to view which part of the website users are spending most of their clicks and helps you to improve the efficiency of your website. Livesession also has a funnel feature using which you can identify where the users are dropping off from their website journey, using which you can increase the conversion rate.
Livesession has a free tier using which you can capture up to 1000 free sessions and test the tool.
7. Lucky orange
Lucky orange has tools, Dynamic Heatmaps, Session Recording, and Live Chat; you can capture and analyze user website vising behavior using these tools. The session playback tool allows you to adjust speed, skip idle time, etc., and view the trouble points quickly. The heatmap tool will enable you to study the clicks and scrolls of your website, and you can view each of your website elements’ performance.
Lucky orange offers a 7-day free trial using which you can test the tool.
8. Crazyegg
Crazyegg uses session recording and visual report tools to understand user journeys. Using the heatmap tool, you can see how your traffic sources and marketing channels are performing. You can also generate a report that shows the individual page performance by traffic sources and marketing channels.
Crazyegg offers 30-day free trial for you to test the tool before making the purchase.
Conclusion
All the above tools have almost identical features in their offerings. Most of the above session recording tools offer a free trial period, using which you can test it before making a decision. As a website owner, you can use these tools to identify website issues, optimize the performance and increase your visitor’s conversion rate.