Session Replay: New tools are emerging that provide additional layers of website analytics information.

Session replay

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Session replay is the ability to replay a visitor's journey on a web site or within a web application. Replay can include the user's view (browser or screen output), user input (keyboard and mouse inputs), and logs of network events or console logs. It can be used in studying web site usability and customer behavior as well handling customer service questions as the full customer journey with all interactions can be replayed.
There are generally two ways to capture and replay visitor sessions, tag-free server side and client side.

Tag-free server side

Solutions capture all website traffic and replay every visitor interaction, from every device, including all mobile users from any location. Sessions are replayed step-by-step, providing the ability to search, locate and analyse aspects of a visitors session including clicks and form entry. Server side solutions require hardware and software to be installed "on premise".
The main providers of server side session replay solutions are:

• Tealeaf
• UserReplay
• Clarisite

Cloudmeter is now part of Splunk^[1] and is no longer available as a separate solution.

Client side

There are many tag based solutions that offer video replay of a visitors session. These solutions can also show mouse movements and clicks. The underlying data for the videos is recorded by tagging pages. Some advanced tools are able to access the DOM directly and can play back most interactions with a high degree of accuracy.
The main providers of tag based session replay solutions are:

• Decibel Insight
• Clicktale
• Mouseflow
• SessionCam

References

1. "Splunk Announces Acquisition of Cloudmeter".

http://www.sessioncam.com/blog/what-is-session-replay/

Categories:

• Web analytics