Session replay

Session replay is the ability to replay a visitor's journey on a

customer behavior, and the handling of customer service

questions as the customer journey, with all interactions, can be replayed. Some organizations also use this capability to analyse fraudulent behavior on websites.

Some solutions augment the session replay with advanced analytics that can identify segments of customers that are struggling to use the website.[2] This allows for the replay capability to be used much more efficiently and reduces the need to replay other customer sessions unnecessarily.

There are generally two ways to capture and replay visitor sessions, client side and tag-free server side.

Client side

There are many tag-based solutions that offer video-like replay of a visitor's session. While replay is analogous to video, it is more accurately a reproduction of a specific user's experience detailing mouse movements,

clicks, taps, and scrolls. The underlying data for the session recordings is captured by tagging pages. Some advanced tools are able to access the Document Object Model (DOM) directly and can play back most interactions within the DOM including all mutations with a high degree of accuracy. There are a number of tools that provide similar functions, with the advantage of being able to replay the entire client experience in a movie-like format. It also can deal with modern single-page applications. The disadvantage is that the tracking script can easily be detected and blocked by any ad blocker which has become normal (2017: 615M devices with active adblock).^[3]

Tag-free server side

These solutions capture all website traffic and replay every visitor interaction from every device, and these include all mobile users from any location. Sessions are replayed step-by-step, providing the ability to search, locate and analyze aspects of a visitor's session including clicks and

form

entry. Server-side solutions require hardware and software to be installed "on premises." An advantage of server-side recording is that the solution cannot be blocked. However, one will not be able to see a video-like replay of client-side activities such as scrolling and mouse movements. This also poorly handles modern single-page applications.