Why should you watch user recordings?
Recordings help you figure out where are visitors getting angry, lost or confused. What kind of problems they’re encountering and what can be improved.
You’ll see your website exactly as your visitors see it. With the exact same resolution and the same placement of elements (even if they’re using a smartphone). You see where people click or tap. And what pages they visit.
Recordings also show you how different is the behavior of people who convert. Maybe they always visit a certain page. Then you can lead every single visitor to that page to increase your conversions.
How do user recordings will help you
See what’s confusing about your website.
User recordings can save you crazy amounts of money you’d need to organize user testing.
See what a user did before a bug happened: That saves precious time to the Q&A team that often has to figure out how to reproduce that bug.
Sees what users did wrong and help them with their issue without endless back & forth communication.
Conversion Rate Optimization experts use replays as a source of A/B testing ideas that massively boost your conversion rates.
How do Website Recordings Work?
When you first think about website recordings, you might think that they could be hard to collect.
You might think that you need specific equipment and gather some test subjects to start recording their sessions.
However, collecting website recordings is way easier than you’d think.
In fact, you can collect website recordings on every single one of your website visitors by just adding a small snippet of code to your website.
These recordings are then automatically collected and stored for you to review later.
Why You Should use Website Recordings
If you’re still on the fence about integrating website recordings on your site, let’s break down some of the key reasons why you should and how this technology can help your business.
It can improve your marketing campaigns
What’s the goal of any landing page out there? To convert users into customers.
If you are able to see how your users interact with your marketing landing pages, you can then identify improvements you can make to these pages to directly increase your conversion rates.
This strategy can increase the ROI from any marketing campaign that includes interactions with your website.
It can help you create better products
Website recordings are incredibly useful when it comes to UI and UX design.
In fact, they can be used as early as in the alpha phases of development to better understand how customers use a specific feature in a software or web application.
As a result, said software or application is built from the ground up while accounting for the user’s experience.
Without website recordings, your team might build UI and UX experiences that are not yet user-tested, increasing your development times when deployed designs need to be improved.
It can help you solve website issues faster
Many users in your site might run into an issue that’s preventing them from becoming a customer.
And worse… they might not even report said issues.
As a result, you’d be left in the dark on an issue that is taking sales away from you.
By reviewing your website recordings, you can find unreported issues that might be affecting your users and recover any potentially lost future sales.
The pros and cons of visitor recording and session replay tools
So why do companies choose to work with session recording tools? Do the pros really outweigh the cons? The only way to find out is by looking at both sides. Let’s take a look below.
Shows live online visitor interactions.
Looks at individual visitor sessions.
Discovers where visitors are getting stuck in particular funnels (e.g. the shopping cart) or dropping off.
Helps find and reproduce bugs to enhance the user experience.
Understand and improve onboarding processes. See specifically where users are failing in onboarding flows.
Test and enhance new features or pages. For example, see how visitors react to a new landing page.
Cons:
Missing context. There is no explanation directly from the visitor regarding their activity. Visitor actions are left up to the business to interpret.
Difficult to analyse large numbers of individual visitor sessions.
Time consuming to watch individual recordings and not every recording will provide valuable insights.
Introduces a privacy risk for personal visitor data.
Read more about this here.
Here is our list of the most popular visitor recording and session replay tools:
Choosing the right visitor recording and session replay tool for you
Each of these visitor recording and session replay tools certainly has its own advantages and disadvantages – whether that be pricing, or analysis capabilities such as tagging and filtering, etc. However, the fact of the matter is – no single visitor recording and session replay tool is perfect.
There are several privacy risks involved in using such tools , including an increased vulnerability to function creep and the fact that this type of data collection falls under profiling. While capturing this data with a simple opt-out is legal now, things are certainly changing on the session replay tool front.
An alternative to visitor recording and session replay tools is visual feedback. This type of feedback collection is risk-free in that the initiative to provide the user with data lies with the visitor. This is also a much more trusted approach as it doesn’t involve the company having to ‘peak over the shoulder’ of the visitor while they are browsing the website.
We hope this list will provide you with some inspiration in choosing the right tool for recording your visitors.
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