Session replay | Definition

Session replay, also known as session recording, is an analytics method that allows you to watch real video sessions of your product to understand in-app behavior.

Session replay is mainly, but not exclusively, used by product managers, UX designers, customer success managers, and developers.

It has a large variety of use cases. Session replay can be used to:

• Increase conversion rates

• Replicate crashes and bugs

• Uncover user experience insights

• Give contextual support

Session replay is a qualitative analytics method. It’s focused on understanding individual user behavior, which differentiates it from quantitative analytics methods that are focused on numerical data.

To give an example: You have an app and you use both quantitative and qualitative analytics. You analyze the state of your app and you notice that a certain crash happens regularly.

By just relying on traditional analytics, you would know that a crash happens, but you would lack the context to replicate and fix it quickly.

With session replay, you could easily watch videos with all the actions that led to the crash. This solves the problem and would enable you to fix the issue quicker.

There’s a variety of session replay tools on the market. Here are just three of them:

• Hotjar: Hotjar is a session replay tool for web apps. The tool allows you to record sessions based on URLs and provides basic filters to find interesting sessions quicker.

• SessionCam: SessionCam's session replay technology is focused on e-commerce. Each session gets assigned a score, which makes it easier to find sessions where users struggle.

• UXCam: UXCam is the market leader for qualitative app analytics. It’s dedicated to mobile apps. UXCam’s session replay technology automatically indexes all micro-interactions. In doing so, it can show you problematic sessions automatically.