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Digital Doughnut Contributor
Digital Doughnut Contributor 26 November 2021

If You Want the Best Ecommerce User Experience, Use Session Replay

As we live in the digital age, it is essential to invest in your website. You must reach and attract your target audience with useful content and an enjoyable user experience. Your target audience should find your marketing strategies and ideas appealing.

As we live in the digital age, it is essential to invest in your website. You must reach and attract your target audience with useful content and an enjoyable user experience. Your target audience should find your marketing strategies and ideas appealing.

Good web pages with good content lead to good conversion rates. How can you decide whether your marketing campaign is working or not? What proof do you have that an alternative technique or plan would be more effective?

Visualize your customers' interactions with your website to see if they are satisfied with your website. This easy and affordable method is called session replay.

What is Session Replay?

Session replay is a web analytics tool, that enables web developers to improve their websites' performance. They're a visual representation of the user's mouse movements and mouse clicks, scrolling, and typing during a session on your website.

Session replay is a tool that analyzes user behavior to improve the usability and conversion rate of your website. Understanding the visitors' intentions is thought to be a good way to target marketing or product development efforts. Session replay is a great tool for knowing what your consumers are experiencing and why they are abandoning your website or app.

Session replay is a great approach to figure out what difficulties your visitors are having and why they're leaving your website or app. Then go back to the beginning and repeat the process with less "game-changing" issues.

How to use Session Replay?

What should you do after you've started your session replay tool?

The first thing you should do is segment your visitors. Determine which visitors are returning and which ones are new. The reason for this is that returning visitors are already familiar with your website, so they can navigate it as if nothing were wrong. Take your time and don't rush through the process, since this may lead to inaccurate findings.

Don't try to fix all of the bugs at once after you discover them. Create a hierarchy list of your problems. Select issues that have a greater impact on UX (user experience) and fix them while running tests until you're satisfied with the outcome.

Why is Session Replay Helpful?

1. Session replay can increase your conversion rates

This is, without a doubt, the most significant advantage of session replays. They have the potential to greatly improve the functionality of your website. This tool can provide you with a substantial competitive advantage over your competitors in this sector.

With session replay, you can look for sessions with errors in them (i.e. when a click results in a JavaScript error). Identifying issues and potential bugs on your website is critical if you want to provide a user interface that is simple to use. Session replays are useful for determining where on your website users can't find what they're looking for and leave.

2. Session replay can help you gain a better understanding of your users

When you observe how your users navigate your website, you gain a better understanding of them. You can see all of their mouse movements, scrolls, and clicks, giving you a good idea of what they're thinking. It can also assist you in gaining a better understanding of your users' perspectives, such as what they like and dislike about your website.

3. Session replay can detect user frustration

A session replay tool records all visitor interactions, it can detect signals of user dissatisfaction too. Some programs can detect Rage Clicks, which occur when users repeatedly click on specific elements on your website. Some session replay tools can detect when users abandon your website or app.

4. Session replay can prevent you from being hacked

Session replay can also be used as a security measure on your website. Some tools available on the market are capable of detecting potentially harmful attacks on your website. Session replay can help you detect suspicious activity on your website, such as:

  • Scripting,
  • URL attacks,
  • SQL injection attacks,
  • Cross-site scripting, or any other methods hackers may use on your website.

5. Session replay can improve your company’s customer support

One of the most effective ways to gain traction is to provide excellent customer service. Session replays can be extremely useful in this case. They may be able to reflect on why one of your customers contacted your customer service department.

By watching session replays you can solve problems with a lack of information. Customer support can also use Session Replay for co-browsing, to see what users see, and help guide them through the website.

6. With session replay, you can fix a bad UX design

Session replays help you improve your conversion rates, lower your bounce rates, and give you feedback on your website. When it comes to design quality, users are generally quite demanding, so a poorly designed website may turn them off and cause them to leave. It's possible that the overall design isn't ideal and needs to be improved if there are no bugs or broken links on that page.

7. Session replay helps you with presentation

When you need to present an idea to your superiors and want to implement it at your company, session replays come in handy. These session replays can be used as graphical illustrations to present some of the issues that users are having.

Features to use in a Session Replay

When you have thousands of sessions to sort through, getting insights from recordings might take time. Here are six features of a session replay tool must-have, to save time and locate the recordings you are looking for.

1. Adjustable replay speed

It might take a long time to watch session replays, especially if your visitors make many page views. Look for a feature, that allows you to change the playback speed. With this, you can get the information you need faster.

2. Site-wide page viewing and recording

When analyzing user activity, you may want to know how people navigate over numerous pages. Look for a solution that allows you to track a user's full journey as they go around your site.

3. Filters for specific issues

Are you looking for web bugs? Examine session recordings that have been filtered by user behavior. Rage clicks and u-turns are frequent indicators of a bug or broken element.

4. Alerts and notifications

Use a session replay tool that has an "alerts and notifications" feature. With this, you can study your segments' behavior on your website.

5. Segmented recordings

Session recording segments can save you a lot of time when you need to watch replays from users who did certain activities. Create a filter for visitors who fled the checkout page. For example, if you want to figure out why clients on your e-commerce site are abandoning their carts.

6. Keyboard stroke recording

You might want to know what your users are typing in the search bar. Keystroke recording comes in handy in this situation. This feature allows you to see what users type in search bars and other fields while anonymizing personal information.

Where is Session Replay Useful?

Session replay can be used to analyze almost any aspect of your online marketing or product strategy. Here are a few areas where user behavior insights can help:

1. A/B testing

A/B testing is used by marketers to improve conversion rates on their websites. For example, you might want to see which of your landing page's calls to action leads to more people moving on to the next page or step of your funnel. With session replay, you can decide which version was more successful based on visitors' behavior.

2. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

CRO is a structured and systematic approach to improving the performance of your website. With CRO you can increase the percentage of visitors who complete specific actions on your site. With CRO a larger percentage of your visitors will find your website useful and informative and take the actions you desire.

The conversion rate is the most important metric for determining digital marketing success in today's world.

3. Product management

Product management is an important part of an organization. Product managers are typically employed by companies that develop products for online customers. The product manager is in charge of the strategy, roadmap, and feature definition for the product. The people in charge must be able to:

  • Identify customer needs.
  • Determine whether a design is good or bad,
  • Determine whether it meets the customer's need in the most effective way.

By using session replay the product manager can identify the errors, and design a better website. The goal is to lead the customer through the purchasing process. For more information, here is a guide to session replays for product managers.

4. User experience (UX) and design research

Designers are aware that even the most elegant website or app design will elicit unexpected user behavior once it is launched. Design elements can be affected by changes in devices, browsers, and the state of the page or app.

Observing sessions, behaviors, and user interactions can help you understand the UX around your web design.

5. Customer support

For professionals, session replay has become a must-have customer support tool. Why? Support agents can use playback to gain important context when resolving customers’ issues. It even allows customer support teams to "live" co-browse with users. Watching a session replay:

  • Saves time,
  • Increases empathy among support staff, and
  • Results in better, more efficient outcomes.

6. Marketing

Marketers measure ROI to see how well different campaigns influence specific actions, such as:

  • Clicks,
  • Lead generation,
  • Conversions, and
  • Other KPIs.

By providing the necessary nuance of real user behaviors, session replay can help you optimize conversions.

You can also assess the quality of a marketing tactic if your session replay tool allows you to search and analyze segments of users based on their behaviors or acquisition channel.

Final Thoughts

Session replays are a crucial tool for any UX designer or developer to use and incorporate into their website. They're easy to navigate, clear, and concise, and they provide a wealth of information.

Session replays have a number of benefits for your website:

  • They can increase conversion rates and lower bounce rates on your pages.
  • They can help you with customer service and presentations.
  • They can even provide some security measures to prevent hack attacks.
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