How can you know what your customer thinks?
It’s a question that all marketers try to answer; it’s the key to a successful marketing campaign.
But not everyone knows how to acquire such knowledge.
That’s why session replay is a really powerful tool, which will help you to see what your customer does on your site.
We’re going to show you how session replays work and how you can use them to improve your business.
But first things first.
What are session replays?
Session replays are video recordings of the user’s screen while he navigates through your website or app.
This might sound scary, but it’s a really powerful tool that you can use for good.
Session replays are a video of your customer doing what they normally do on your site while you watch them and analyse their actions in detail.
The video can differ based on several factors:
- How much time did your customer spend on your website
- Which pages did your customer view?
- Has he switched to another tab?
- Is he reading your content?
- And much more factors
How do session replays work?
All you have to do to record a session replay is installing a user insight tool that has session replays in its products; for example, FigPii is a user insight tool with products like heat maps, user polls, session replays, and an A/B testing engine.
Once you’ve installed the code on your website and it’s up and running, you’ll find all the in-depth data that you look for!
Some of the data that you can see in FigPii is:
- Time spent on page
- Pageviews
- Clicks
- Date of the recording
- Country
- The device (Mobile or Desktop)
- OS
- Browser
What session replays show?
Session replays reveal how customers interact with your website or app, such as mouse movements, scrolling speed, time spent reading content, etc.
By watching these details about each session replay session you’ve recorded so far will help to improve conversion rates by understanding customers better.
Which leads to more conversions! Demonstrating that session replays are an important part of any digital marketing strategy and should not go unnoticed.
It’s a way to see how your customer interacts with your site and identify problem areas that need solving.
Session replays are the key to understanding what customers think about your website or app, but they also help you improve conversion rates by fixing any issues on it.
This is why session replay should be an important part of every digital marketing strategy.
Every client will have different problems when browsing around our sites, which results in a higher bounce rate for some pages than for others.
Session replays allow us to pinpoint these problematic areas and fix them!
This leads to more conversions because we don’t lose potential customers because one page didn’t work out well enough.
We also see what we can improve to boost our conversion rate.
We use session recordings to answer questions like:
- Did they read the content?
- Did they see my CTA?
- Have I delivered my message in the section above the fold?
The idea behind these questions is that if they kept on scrolling up and down or bounced from page to page, they haven’t found the right content for them.
You can also uncover issues that customers face when using different browsers and platforms!
- Did they run into any bugs? If yes, which browser has the most issues?
- Does my website display any errors that aren’t clear?
- Is my user interface simple enough? Are visitors struggling?
The idea behind these questions is that if they faced any issues that no one complained about because they aren’t invested enough, you should know it!
Because such issues could be harming your business’ conversion rate greatly.
Also, you can’t always trust what the users say.
A session replay is not biased and will show you what your customer does on your site without a filter.
Let me give an example of that.
Canvas Flip wrote a blog over on Medium where he said, “The point is, you cannot ask users what they want. My team and I recently conducted a study. The participants told us that they used a feature on a “regular” basis. But when I looked at the analytics, I witnessed a different story: they only used the feature maybe every 3–4 months.”
It’s surprising that sometimes depending on just user answers, you might be missing out on what’s really going on, and session replays are a good way to get that data.
It is important to note that session recordings should be an important part of every digital marketing strategy as insights no other tool could tell you!
So let me ask again: Is your customer interaction system up-to-date? Do you know why people come back to your site over and over?
What session replays can’t tell you?
Session replays cannot display if the session has been influenced by any other marketing campaigns that are running, for example, a high-quality landing page or an A/B test.
Session replays provide raw data about how customers interact with your website while they navigate through it.
It’s up to you what you do with this data and how you can use it.
If session replays help your business, great! If not, that is also OK because session recordings are a way to understand the customer better by seeing their journey through our website or app as they interact with different content on it.
This helps us improve conversion rates and see where we need to make improvements for the future.
Session replay may not always tell you exactly what happened at each step of the session.
But they will provide an overview of all steps in order which can then give insights into potential problems users might face throughout a session.
Without any other tool being able to show these issues. Session records should still be considered one important part of a digital marketing strategy.
How to get the right info from your session recordings?
If you want to get the right data from your session recordings, then you need to know where to look!
Let’s say that you’ve goals installed in GA (Google Analytics); this is a great starting point.
So if you’re an e-commerce store and you’re tracking your conversions, it serves you well to know which part might’ve influenced the buying decision.
Let me give you an example…
You have session recordings, and you want to know the path that led your visitor to convert.
To do this, take a look at what was happening on the site before they converted; did they go through checkout flow or not?
If yes, then it is good for us as we can see which part of our website drove them into converting. If no, then maybe there’s something else driving their behaviour.
Did they check reviews first? have they watched product videos before buying?
Lots and lots of questions can be answered easily using session replays.
And session replays are also great when looking at customer engagement with different content types: video vs. text vs. images…etcetera!
Executive summary
Session recording tools are the easiest way to tap into your users’ minds.
It uncovers a lot of hidden opportunities and problems while not disturbing your users or visitors.
But every tool has its ups and downs; there are things that a session replay tool can’t uncover for you.
But that’s usually not an issue; if you set up your goals and analytics right, you’ll be able to get the most out of your session replay tool.
About the Author
Mostafa Daoud is a Growth Marketer at FigPii, who also has his own blog and podcast where he talks about marketing courses and if they’re good or not, you can follow him here