You have got hours and hours of session recordings – now what?
You could spend a whole week watching every visitor’s recording.
– or –
You can read this article and know exactly how to deal with this.
Table of contents
What is Session Recording?
Session Recording is a tool that allows you to browse recorded sessions of real website visitors, which is then used to collect deep behavioral insights. It offers users the ability to understand the visitor’s entire journey on the website, such as detecting clicks, scrolls, mouse movements, and more.
What insights does Session Recording bring?
Session Recording captures the user session on the website (sometimes called a visit), which is simply a presence of a user with a specific IP address who has not visited the site recently (typically, anytime within the past 30 minutes).
After recording it, it facilitates careful observations on the visitor’s browsing behavior, which not only leads to detecting issues like friction areas, experience breakage, and more but also helps you figure out which part of your website attracts visitors the most. Or, in contrast, what distracts them from the webpage’s primary CTA, leading to low conversion rates, what makes them drop out from the funnel, and so on.
What makes a good Session Recording analysis?
Session Recording allows you to make confident decisions that are backed by data and direct behavioral analysis. As seen above, Session Recording lets you work and resolve the issue directly.
A large number of visitors will result in a large number of recorded sessions, which would need to be analyzed to uncover the issues and provide insights for optimization. And obviously, not all of them are what we are looking for. Not all of them include a solution to our problem. And one has the time, resources, and motivation to look through thousands of recordings.
That’s where UXtweak’s SmartSearch feature comes in handy, which eliminates this issue, and allows for perfecting and accurizing the analysis. Let us explain how.
SmartSearch
UXtweak’s technique to collect data is through picture reproduction and DOM. This allows us to use SmartSearch efficiently and apply filters directly to recordings. On the other hand, other tools which use simple video recordings of user’s sessions don’t allow such advanced filtering through the recordings. The technique that we use presents the user with a lot of perks.
There is no special setup or complicated settings beforehand to start using SmartSearch filters. All you need to do is implement the Session Recording tool into your website, which is a three-click process with Google Tag Manager, and you can start using SmartSearch filters.
What is the SmartSearch feature?
Session Recordings Tools, such as UXtweak’s Session recording, collects a large amount of data. SmartSearch feature allows you to browse accurately and efficiently through the enormous data collection and gain insight into the behavior of your visitors.
Session recording indexes all of the data collected from the recorded sessions. Going through these data would be inefficient and time-consuming. That is why SmartSearch – a real powerhouse of a tool – gives you the ability to filter through various characteristics of recorded sessions to ensure you will find what you are looking for.
Let’s take a look at an example:
You started a new website that offers Russian visitors to buy your product, your company is a new one, and so far, you’ve implemented only a desktop version of your web(meaning that your website is not responsive for mobile devices, so you already know conversion rate is low for phone users).
Because of that, you’re mainly focusing on and targeting desktop users from Russia (for now). The conversion rates you are experiencing are lower than you expected. Therefore you would like to know if there are some issues with your desktop website.
And to find out, you need to filter out visitors that visited your website and used a desktop, signed up for your page, and are from Russia but didn’t interact with your website’s CTA. For the sake of this example, let’s say it’s buying your product. To accomplish this, you would set a combination of filters, in this example, specifically four filters:
1. You want to filter those that visited your website through desktop:
2. You want to filter those that you’re targeting, e.g. Russians:
3. You want to filter those who signed-up successfully, you accomplish this by either pasting in the button’s label or the CSS Selector.
4. Finally, you want to apply one last logic to filter out the visitors that did not buy your product (once again you have two options):
Or by using a CSS selector of the element. Here is a video tutorial on how to find a CSS selector of element and use it in SmartSearch:
Voilà! You apply your filters, and only those visitors that meet these conditions show up:
We can then replay those visitor’s sessions and see what was wrong and why they didn’t click on it. We can analyze the user’s behavior and look for behavior patterns or technical issues that users experienced.
And that is how SmartSearch shows us what is wrong and how to improve.
We created this example to give you an idea of how it works.
What other features does SmartSearch have?
SmartSearch offers you a vast number of filters:
SmartSearch provides nested filters that allow combining different filtering rules on several different levels:
- User Rules: filter users by their attributes
e.g. name, email, number of sessions….
- Session Rules: filter on the scope of the user’s sessions
e.g. session duration, location….
- Pageview Rules: filter sessions where the users visited several different pages
e.g. URL, referrer, load time…
- Event Rules: Filter only within the scope of the filter pageview it’s placed into. To filter by event without a particular page in mind simply place an event rule in a pageview that has no URL filter.
e.g. clicked text or CSS Selector, form change text or CSS Selector…
Autosuggestion feature in search
SmartSearch provides smart suggestions. Just start typing, and it will take care of the rest saving you even more time.
“To add a filtering rule for any of these categories, simply start typing the type of the filtering rule that you want (e.g. “name”, “session duration”, “visited URL”, “clicked text”, etc.). UXtweak will automatically create a new filtering rule for you in the Custom filter. However, for more complex filters (like looking for sessions that have a particular set of pageviews and events), you will have to open the Custom filter and create additional pageviews and events yourself. The SmartSearch bar places all new rules into the first defined pageview and the first defined event. “
“By playing around with filters, you can do more advanced queries that cannot be expressed by simply typing into the SmartSeach bar.“
How does SmartSearch accurize my analysis?
Filters are useful for sorting a large number of data. This allows you to find exactly the recordings you are interested in. You usually already know what to expect in the recordings and what you should look for. You know what filters apply to the user, so you know what they are or are not going to do.
But the question is not what but why.
You want to put the focus on the small group of users according to your filters.
You accurize the data.
Then, you want to analyze this carefully to identify the problem and come up with a solution.
That is how you accurize your analysis by knowing what you are looking for.
SmartSearch makes this all possible.
Conclusion: Improve your data analysis effectiveness
Session replay is a gold mine when it comes to observing and learning from the experience of your users. The tool gives you insights to find out where your users struggle, if and where they experience issues, but as well as which parts of your website are interesting for them. They are your best friends for monitoring your website and user behavior analytics. To learn more about Session Recording and all the ways it can help you read our “session recording 101”. Since they collect such a vast amount of data, you need help with finding the recordings that matter to you, and that is what SmartSearch is for.
SmartSearch allows you to filter out respondents so you only analyze those that matter to you. You can search for sessions by attributes such as location, device, browser, time, visited and referrer URLs, CSS selectors of clicked elements, inserted text, and many more. Also, you can put these filters atop one another like building blocks to create more complex filters. Register to UXtweak and try the effective Session Recording tool with SmartSearch filters yourself.
