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The user experience significantly impacts the success of your website, web app, or landing page. If users can’t find what they’re looking for, or if the site feels clunky and slow, they won’t hang around for long.
Session recording tools help you monitor and review user activity on multiple pages. You can tweak your site based on behavior analytics to provide future visitors with an even better experience.
FullSession, our web analytics platform, provides you with session recordings and replays to troubleshoot issues users might have with your site. It also gives you access to website heatmap tools and customer feedback tools to get a complete picture of your website performance.
Start your 14-day free trial or get a demo to see all features in action.
In this guide, we will explain the essentials of recording sessions and provide a list of helpful tools that offer this feature. We will also explain why FullSession is the best solution for your business.
Let’s introduce session recordings and replays.
Optimize Your UX With Session Recordings
Track clicks, taps, mouse movements and hovers to visualize user frustration and help you improve UX, with FullSession.
A session recording tracks your website visitors’ behavior to help identify bottlenecks and pain points during the customer journey. A session recording captures navigation, mouse movements, scrolling patterns, form fills, clicks, and more.
Session replays are recordings of everything that happens during a session on a website. It includes all the clicks, scrolls, keystrokes your users make, and other interactions with the site.
You can use this information to make your site more user-friendly and improve the overall experience for visitors.
Session recording and replays provide many benefits to your business. With these features, you can:
While valuable, session recordings and replays can’t record all user activities. Let’s explain.
When it comes to the session recording, there are some drawbacks you need to watch out for.
Session recording doesn’t capture the following:
Let’s discuss the sensitive data in the following section.
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Data security has become more critical than ever due to security issues.
People are more concerned about hackers and security breaches than ever before, so they’re paying more attention to how businesses handle their private information.
Transparency regarding privacy disclosures is crucial to any business hoping to avoid legal consequences related to information compromise, security infringement, and cybercrime.
FullSesion, our session recording software will help you stay on top of your customers’ activities while protecting them from identity theft and unauthorized access. We don’t capture user information typed in by hand.
FullSession doesn’t have access to sensitive information, such as credit card details or login credentials. It doesn’t track users’ activity across the Internet, and you can’t use it for behavioral advertising purposes.
Instead, FullSession provides a technical solution for understanding how users interact with your product.
Session recordings are prevalent in the following industries:
However, you can use session recordings and replays for tracking all types of websites. There are no limitations.
Here are the job functions that benefit the most from session recording and session replay
As you can see, all employees in your company can use session recording and replay to improve customer satisfaction. To get the best out of it, they need proper tools. Let’s dive into the details.
Session recording tools are software applications that record the browser activity of your users as they navigate your website. There are three main components of session recording tools: screen recording, bug tracking, and user experience analytics.
You can use user behavior data to improve the website’s usability, performance, and security. You can also identify potential website issues before they affect your conversion rates.
To start using FullSession and our session recording tool, you should sign up for a 14-day free trial and complete the registration process, including adding our site tracking code to your source code.
We will start gathering data without affecting your site performance and show them in easy-to-understand reports.
Once you log in to your account, you will see our analytics dashboard that includes Session Playlist. It shows all recorded sessions with details such as user ID, date and time, location, device, and operating system.
Select a session recording from the list and click on the green Play button to watch a session replay. You will be redirected to the new panel, where you can see all essential information about the session.
In the top menu, you can see the URL, referring page, heatmap tab, screen resolution, and an option to share the recording.
In the bottom menu, you can set up the replay speed up to eight times faster, add a comment, see the session duration, skip inactivity, or open developers’ tools.
On the right side of the panel, you will see additional data related to the session recording
By clicking on the heatmaps tab in the session recording panel, you will get additional features to assess user behavior during the session.
You can select the device type and choose between the click map, cursor map, or scroll map. If you’re new to heatmaps, you can read our guide on how to read a heatmap. It’s an excellent feature for conducting a customer experience analysis.
Here are some examples to help you understand how our heat maps work.
Our interactive heat maps boost your session recordings with the following
You can use this data to filter essential customer actions and improve your website performance.
FullSession helps you get customer feedback by creating and placing a website feedback form on your website. We provide a handy form creator you can use to set up your questions, align form appearance with your branding, and select devices and pages to show the form. We present results in the customer feedback report.
When a user leaves feedback on your site, you can watch a connected session recording and replay the video to understand better what happened during the session.
If the user leaves negative feedback, you can assess the issue and improve your site layout, features or content.
The FullSession platform offers a 14-day free trial. It provides two paid plans—Basic and Business. Here are more details on each plan.
If you need more information, you can get a demo.
Let’s explain why we consider FullSession the best session recording tool for your business.
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Our session recording software allows you to spot missing information and hidden user trends. Here are nine reasons to start using FullSession for your website tracking needs.
FullSession lets you gather data on what’s happening behind the scenes. It allows you to see where errors happen, how often they happen, and what causes them. You can solve issues by fixing code, testing features, or altering the design.
You can use FullSession during the development phase to see if
It helps you improve the overall product quality and ensure everything works harmoniously.
FullSession helps improve the user flow to increase conversions and create an optimized website or a landing page design tailored to your users’ needs.
You can improve their engagement with content on the page, help people find what they’re looking for faster, or provide the information they previously missed.
Regarding the user interface, you need a tool to fix errors and identify what went wrong. FullSession lets you access recordings in real-time, allowing you to view interactions at the time of the problem without disrupting the customer experience. You can then use your findings to create a solution that improves your UI for future customers.
If your session replays show that many visitors get confused, drop off, or don’t complete the desired steps on your website, it’s time to take action. FullSession will help you identify user frustration points and set up a solution to reduce these issues.
With FullSession, you can use automatic event tracking to identify any signs of suspicious user activity. It’s also helpful in validating that your security features work as expected. You can analyze captured data, determine the nature of the threat and take action.
FullSession can show you how customers interact with your website and provide valuable information that is difficult for humans alone to gather through conversation-based research methods like surveys or interviews.
Watching a session replay can result in better outcomes for both customer support staff and customers. It allows your reps to provide more efficient solutions since they can see what happened during each session.
Unlike other website session recording tools like Hotjar, FullSession allows you to capture analytics data and make accurate UX analyses without slowing down your site.
FullSession provides a skip-inactivity feature that lets you quickly find important events in a session. You can also use advanced filtering and segmentation to find necessary data in a blink of an eye.
FullSession provides a free trial for 14 days. You can create an account or request a demo if you need more information.
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If you are looking for session replay tools for your website, you have come to the right place. We’ve researched instead of you and analyzed top vendors for session recording besides our FullSession solution. Continue reading to learn more about them.
Image source: Search Engine Land
Microsoft Clarity helps you see how people use your site. It makes it easy to identify problems and opportunities and to test new ideas. It is GDPR-compliant and built on an open-source basis. It’s a good solution for online businesses, from bloggers to digital marketers and product teams.
Microsoft Clarity allows you to record visitor behavior on your site. It provides rich data for improving your site, like mouse tracking, click tracking, and scroll monitoring.
Recordings are available for most sessions and usually appear 30 minutes after the start of the session, but they may take up to 2 hours to process. Remove the Microsoft Clarity code for page URLs you don’t want to track.
With Microsoft Clarity, you can:
Apart from free usage, Microsoft Clarity also has other benefits. Here are some of them:
Microsoft Clarity also has some drawbacks. Here are some of them:
To learn more about this product, read our Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity comparison.
Image source: Crozdesk
Inspectlet offers automatic event tracking and reveals the exact steps people take on your site. You can set up conversion funnels to make personalized site experiences for your customers, gather data on mouse movement, scrolls, and clicks, and see how visitors move around your site.
With the help of Inspectlet, you can better understand your customers’ perspectives. With Inspectlet, you can:
Here are some of the pros of Inspectlet:
Here are some of the cons of Inspectlet
To learn more about this product, read our Hotjar vs Inspectlet comparison.
Image source: G2
Hotjar helps you understand how visitors use your website. With Hotjar, you can improve the user experience and conversion rates and increase sales. With session recordings, surveys, polls, and visitor recording features, Hotjar helps you reach more customers and meet your business goals.
Hotjar helps you make data-driven decisions on how to improve your online presence. Here is the list of Hotjar features:
Here are some of the pros of Hotjar:
Here are some of the cons of Hotjar:
Want to learn more about Hotjar and its alternatives? Feel free to check out our in-depth articles:
Image source: G2
Lucky Orange lets you capture user actions through screen recording or session replay. You can quickly identify UX problems that appear on-screen and fix them before they drag the performance of your website.
It’s a good solution for UX designers, product managers, market researchers, digital marketers, and anyone who wants to gather insights about their customer’s behavior.
To learn how this tool compares to other UX analytics solutions, read our article on Lucky Orange alternatives.
Lucky Orange helps you improve your site performance. It provides data to support decisions for creating more effective web performance strategies.
Here is what you get with Lucky Orange:
Here are some of the pros of Lucky Orange:
Here are some of the cons of Lucky Orange:
Image source: G2
Mixpanel is a valuable analytics tool everyone can use. It requires no coding skills, and you can easily integrate it with your website. Mixpanel allows you to track user activity and collect real-time data from your website or mobile app to optimize your product performance.
With MixPanel, you can measure how your visitors interact with your website based on over 70 metrics. It helps you optimize your online presence and make it more effective by constantly collecting and analyzing data.
Here is the shortlist of Mixpanel features.
Here are some of the pros of Mixpanel:
Here are some of the cons of Mixpanel:
To see how Mixpanel compares to other UX solutions, read our article on Mixpanel alternatives.
Image source: G2
FullStory captures both quantitative and qualitative data to let you drive digital transformation and growth. You can integrate FullStory with your existing tech stack.
It allows you to record and replay sessions as they happen, dive into the deep details of each interaction, and discover moments that will transform your understanding of your customers’ needs.
With FullStory, you can see what people did while using your product. It records everything from clicks and mouse movements to scroll behavior.
Here is the list of FullStory features
Here are some of the pros of FullStory:
Here are some of the cons of FullStory:
You can check out our article on FullStory competitors if you want to learn more about this solution. You can also read our LogRocket vs FullStory comparison.
So far, we have evaluated the top six session recording tools you can consider for your web tracking needs. In the next section, we will share a table that summarizes various features and characteristics of these session recording tools.
Here is a summary of the session recording tools discussed in this article.
Features | FullSession | Microsoft Clarity | Inspectlet | Hotjar | Lucky Orange | Mixpanel | FullStory |
Real-time Session recording |
✘ | ||||||
Funnel analysis |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ | ||
Conversion tracking |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ | ||||
Behavioral analytics |
✘ | ||||||
Customer segmentation | |||||||
A/B testing |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ | |
Customer journey mapping |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ | |
Dynamic heatmaps |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ | ||
Free version |
✘ | ||||||
Free trial | |||||||
Surveys and customer feedback |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ | ||||
Insights |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
✘ |
Session recording and replay allow you to use accurate data and make impactful changes to your product. However, you must choose the right tools to help you make the proper UX analysis without affecting your site performance.
FullSession will help you during your session recording journey. Our web analytics platform doesn’t slow down your site while collecting data and provides advanced segmentation and filtering options to help you find questionable user sessions faster.
It can also help you identify areas that need improvement to focus your efforts where they will have the most significant impact.
You can test FullSession features with a 14-day free trial.
You can also request a demo if you need more information.
There are no hidden or upfront costs. Also, you don’t need to add your credit card information to start using the service.
Here are the answers to frequently asked questions about session recordings and replays.
Analyzing session recordings involves a qualitative research approach that includes many tasks, such as
When you assess the data, you can start with website optimization.
If you want to know what your users are doing on your website and see their clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements, you should start using a session replay tool such as FullSession.
We currently offer a free trial to let you test all available features and see if our tool is a good fit for your business.
Session replay captures user experience via a tracking code you install on your website. The session replay tool logs data from visitors’ interactions on your website once you’ve installed the code.
Session replay reconstructs a visitor’s entire journey on your website so you can track website issues and find ways to fix them quickly.
Session recording tools are legal under GDPR if they obtain consent from customers. However, you must ensure your customers understand what these tools do and how they use their data.