Know what visitors do on your website or how they interact with the navigation, article, click, etc.
Record everything users do on your web page without slowing down a website.
Curious?
What if I tell you that you can watch everything your users do on your website? Including click, mouse scroll, etc., like you are watching through a camera.
What Is Session Recording Software?
As evident by their name, session recording software record user actions on a subject web project.
Like, how it worked out for them in real-time, scroll by scroll. In addition, you may get to see what they clicked, where they spent most of their on-page time, mouse movements, etc., and guess what made them bounce off the content.
Put simply, these recording videos will allow you to track everything a user does after landing on your website.
How Does Session Recording Work?
All you do is install a plugin or insert code in your website’s HTML to begin. Subsequently, these tools aggregate user data you can analyze to take appropriate actions.
Based on the tool and underlying code, there may be added functionality. For instance, you can also have information about user location, exit rate, bounce rate, on-page time, etc.
In addition, some tools also provide the software and hardware segmentation of the website visitors, such as devices & browsers, operating systems, etc., used to access the website.
Why Record Website Sessions?
For involuntary user feedback.
This is the biggest reason to record and use browsing behaviors because it puts you in your visitors’ shoes and allows you to look with their eyes, the scrolling, mouse movements, keyboard strokes, etc.
In addition, you may also notice any technical issues or errors encountered by the audience.
These insights are particularly helpful for most webmasters, especially for a high-stakes project. Session recording provides you with pointers to work on for better user experience, analyze their exit behavior, and optimize conversion rates.
In the absence of such sophistication, one cannot ascertain what isn’t working for their users and dragging the growth.
From my personal experience with Microsoft Clarity, I can attest that session recording tools are one of the best for in-depth visitor analysis. Ultimately, webmasters appoint such tools to understand their audience’s pain points and improve subsequently.
Here is the list of services to help you with that. Most of them have a FREE plan, so you can try to see what works for you.
Hotjar
Hotjar helps you with real-time session recording so you can watch what users see on your web page.
You have the option to either record every page or a particular page. Recording a specific page will be useful if your focus is to optimize the landing, product, and pricing page.
Hotjar lets you configure if you want to record a session longer than 30 seconds with some following features.
- Tag the video recording
- Take notes while watching user actions
- Share recording with your team
- Filter/search recording like page contains, exit page, start with,
You can get Hotjar in action on your WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, LightCMS, Shopify, Magento, etc., with one script.
If you are using Google Tag Manager, you may have the script there for easy maintenance.
VWO
VWO can record mouse movements, clicks, and overall user behavior. As per your preference, you can choose to fasten the process or slow down and monitor every single detail. There’s also a super helpful option to skip the timing strap in which users aren’t taking action. This helps you save a lot of time in the process.
In the recording, if you find something that might need improvement, like a visitor getting confused while filling a form, then you can add an observation mark on that exact time to solve it.
There are many more features you’d love to use, so be sure to use their free trial.
UXtweak
UXtweak session recording tool indexes all of the user’s events and makes them searchable with our SmartSearch filters. Thanks to SmartSearch you can filter out only those sessions that, for example: are from the USA, using a mobile device, visit the “Contact us”x subpage, and click on the “Schedule Call” button.
SmartSearch allows you to filter out user sessions effectively and offers suggestions in search to save you even more time.
With UXtweak, you no longer have to sit through hours of session recordings. Choose what gets recorded with surgical precision – a percentage of sessions, specific regions, devices, browsers, screen resolutions, etc.
- Easy 3-clicks implementation with Google Tag Manager.
- GDPR and CCPA compliant
- Click, Scroll, Move, and Tap Heatmaps
- Activity Tracking – with a simple click, you can set up trackers for any event and then track how they influence one another in time.
- Session playback looks and feels like a video but is an exact recreation of your website, including DOM.
- In session playback, you can skip inactivity, take notes, adjust playback speed, or share the recording with a secret URL.
You also access all its features: unmoderated testing, tree testing, and card sorting. A free plan and a 5-day demo are available.
Inspectlet
Inspectlet lets you record 100 sessions per month for FREE. Once recorded, you can filter the videos by many attributes, including.
- Show session from returning/new visitors
- The entry page contains something or visited a specific page
- Exit page contains
Smartlook
Smartlook helps you record and analyze user behavior on your website or mobile app. It has automatic event tracking, which helps you identify if the feature on your website or app is working the way it should be, based on users’ actions.
There’s also an option to focus on one event instead of everything altogether. This means you can see the replay recording of only one feature on your property that you desire. Something that is your primary focus, like an “add to cart” button.
You can also create a funnel and analyze the results of it over time, whether or not it’s performing well. All the collected data gets stored seamlessly, so you can refer back to it whenever needed.
Smartlook is GDPR-compliant and super easy to set up on websites and mobile apps.
Mouseflow
With over 160K customers, Mouseflow is another great option that helps you improve user experience and boost conversions with the required tweaks. They’re GDPR and CCPA-compliant, so you know it’s all within the boundaries.
Here are how Mouseflow helps you:
- Sessions recording and replay that tracks clicks, scrolls, forms, and more
- Heatmaps to determine the areas that get the most attention
- Funnels and reports to identify what might be going wrong in users’ sessions
- Forms that help you see how visitors interact with them
- Surveys that allow users to share their feedback
This solution can be integrated with many apps and platforms like WordPress, Google Analytics, Shopify, Wix, HTML5, etc.
AB Tasty
Apart from helping you monitor users’ behavior and revising your strategy, AB Tasty makes it super easy to make the most out of your collected data. It filters out the useless recordings and presents in front of you the most interesting ones, which have the potential to make an impact.
You can also manually filter the videos by numerous options like device used, OS, number of pages viewed, date, etc. An option allows you to view videos only based on your preferred event—for example, a landing page or navigation bar.
The good thing is that AB Tasty keeps the confidentiality and security of your users at the forefront by hiding sensitive data.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is one of the best-in-class tools for recording session behaviors. It lets you access high-definition recordings of your audience at a preferred speed to gather that important information.
Besides, this is GDPR & CCPA compliant, open-source, and saves those recordings for the last 90 days.
Features:
- Forever free
- Real-time visitor count
- Page heatmaps
- Capture user recording sessions
- Share recordings with the team
- IP Block internal traffic
- Save & export recordings
- Supports custom filters
- Google Analytics integration, etc.
While some use Clarity with other site monitoring tools, I prefer it as a Google Analytics alternative because it saves me from information overload and comes with a super clean interface.
Currently, a few big ones using Microsoft Clarity include Forbes, World Health Organization (WHO), Hewlett-Packard (HP), and more.
SiteRecording
From 500Apps, SiteRecording is a premium user behavior analysis utility that comes bundled with 50 other apps for a flat $14.99 per user.
This tool helps you locate the mouse clicks and areas with low user activity.
Besides, it tracks:
- User geolocations
- IP address
- Device, browser, etc.
SiteRecording also identifies users as new or repeat visitors and indicates the real-time performance of the subject website. Moreover, you will know about the technical blocks a user might face for quick troubleshooting.
It also offers to save unlimited recording sessions and comes with a 14-day free trial to test things out firsthand.
How to Choose the Best Session Recording Tool?
Choosing a site recording software can be difficult since there are many options. But practically, it’s not that tough because of the free trials offered by most such SAAS tools.
Anyways, here are some pointers to help pick the best one:
✅ User experience: Personally, this is the deciding factor for me. In fact, this is the only thing that has made me switch from Google Analytics to Microsoft Clarity. Clarity is so clear 😀 and has just the right information I need for my use case.
✅ Speed drag: Using site recording software will add some code which most likely will slow down your website. To verify this, you can use this free website performance audit tool before and after activating any specific tool and evaluate how much of a drag you can tolerate.
✅ Addons: Generally, site recorders are not standalone tools, and this analysis is bundled with other features. And as a thumb rule, more features mean more code which brings down a website’s loading speed. Consequently, it’s better to leave out any software that’s offering more than what you will possibly benefit from.
✅ Integration: Based on the platform, a specific site recorder may have a plugin to install directly, or you might have to do the HTML thing to get going. And based on how tech savvy you are or if you have any developer onboard, this can be a make or break factor.
✅ Data compliance: Like it or not, these are surveillance tools in disguise. So based on your target audience, go through the fine print to see if they comply with the local laws and won’t get you in some legal trouble.
✅ Free or paid: For startups or people on a budget, this aspect is crucial. However, a few tools (like Microsoft Clarity) are free, and some others have free forever versions (like UXtweak).
Still, many site recorders have free trials, which can help a webmaster to take a deeper look and gauge if they are worth the payment.
Conclusion
The above tools should be able to help with recording visitors’ sessions so you can playback and improve the overall website experience.
