Did you ever wonder how users interact with your web pages or mobile app? If you are a developer or e-commerce business owner, this is definitely a matter that keeps you up at night. After all, if users don’t understand your products or don’t find them useful, you don’t have a client base, which means there’s no chance for profit.
The good news is that you don’t have to imagine how users behave while using your online property. You can use session replay software and see for yourself!
If you don’t know what session replay is or how it can benefit your business, make sure to keep reading as we’ll do a deep dive into this topic.
What is Session Replay?
Also known as Digital Experience Analytics (DXA), session replay software provides your development and sales teams with an accurate reconstruction of how a user experiences an online property (page, website, or mobile app).
The software does that by tracking users’ behavior while interacting with your product and creating a walkthrough-style video to play it back for you. This way, you can see exactly what a user did while browsing your app or website. You can see the entry and exit points, areas where they struggled, how they navigated, the items they activated, and so on.
All this provides critical information when it comes to understanding the digital customer experience your product(s) offer.
Plus, unlike traditional analytics tools, session replay software can create a visual representation of what’s happening when a user visits. And this is more powerful as it provides more detailed insight into the user experience (UX).
It’s just like observing a customer in a brick-and-mortar store. You can take the surveillance footage and replay it until you understand how people move in the store and how changes affect that movement.
The Top 6 Benefits of Using Session Replay
The session replay software that fits your needs comes with a series of benefits that can’t be ignored, such as:
- Accurate visual representation of UX while interacting with your online products (benefits developers, designers, marketing people, and customer support);
- Faster identification of bugs and errors because it’s easier to reproduce the behavior that led to the initial event;
- Optimization of the conversion rate by identifying gaps in your sales funnel;
- Better context for customer support teams and increased customer satisfaction when it comes to solving complaints;
- You can identify potential threats by isolating unusual behavior and understanding its intent;
- Improved onboarding by understanding what trips users and where they get bored and leave.
What You Need to Know
While session replay software should be included in a business’s must-have e-commerce toolkit, you must understand this is not a video recording or even a screen capture of how users interact with your products. The software uses collected data to reconstruct a visual representation of said interaction.
Also, there are a few privacy issues that need to be considered. Session replay software uses mostly the same techniques as analytics tools, but it can go deeper, so you must let your users know by including language in your privacy policy.
Plus, your tool should allow for the exclusion of sensitive data from being collected at all. You may also want to mask user inputs during a session replay to avoid disclosure of confidential information such as usernames and email addresses.
Wrap Up
Session replay is a useful tool when it comes to understanding how users interact with online products. However, it cannot replace other analytics tools and can’t provide all the answers related to UX. Therefore, it’s best to use it in collaboration with other tools to get an accurate image of how your online products fare into the world.
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