Session recording
What is session recording?
Session recording replays a single visit — cursor movement, scrolling, clicks and the moves between pages — as a short film. Nothing is filmed: the player rebuilds the visit from events the browser reported. It shows what the numbers leave unexplained, such as the visitor who scrolled back twice, hesitated over one field and left without saying why.
Example
A shop sees 400 checkouts started a month and 248 finished — 62%. The number does not say why. Twelve recordings of visits that reached the checkout and stopped do: in nine of them the cursor rests on the company registration field, the visitor scrolls up looking for an explanation, and closes the tab.
The field was mandatory for everyone because some buyers need a company invoice. It becomes optional. The next month 284 checkouts finish — 71%. At an average order of €70 that is 36 more orders, around €2,520, without a single extra visit.
Twelve recordings were enough. Nobody watches them in bulk; you watch the ones that end where it hurts.
Why it matters for a business
Analytics shows where people drop out. A recording shows what they were doing in the seconds before. The cause is usually friction: a field asking for something unnecessary, a button that does not look like one, an error message that appears below the fold.
The other side is legal, and it is not a footnote. Replaying one visitor’s behaviour is processing personal data under the GDPR. In practice: the tool starts after consent rather than before it; input fields are masked by default, so names, addresses, passwords and card details never leave the browser; payment pages are usually excluded altogether; recordings have a retention period after which they are deleted; and the vendor is on a data processing agreement. The practice is described in the privacy notice, in words a visitor can follow.
What to ask
- Are all input fields masked, and was that checked on a live recording?
- Does recording start only after consent, and does it stop on a refusal?
- How long are recordings kept, and who on the team can open them?
- Are payment pages and card details recorded? The answer has to be no.
- Where are the recordings stored, and is there a data processing agreement with the vendor?
In the first-party analytics we build, those decisions stay yours rather than a vendor’s.