What is session replay?
In the simplest terms, session replay is a tool that allows you to playback a user’s interactions — including clicks, mouse movements, scrolling, and even form fills — with a web page or application.
This helps product managers see exactly how users are engaging with their platform, offering insights into any usability issues, as well as the overall digital experience.
Does session replay show real data?
The idea that session replay doesn’t show real data is a myth. In fact, it’s the most granular and specific data that you can capture about your customer experience, which is why scaling your ability to use session replay data is so critical to success.
While not every implementation is the same, here are a few reasons why the belief that session replay software doesn’t offer real data is so wrongheaded:
- Captures real user activity: When you playback a user session, you’re seeing what a real visitor did while engaging with your app or site — including every user action, from clicks to keystrokes.
- Data accuracy: Your session replay is effectively a recording of actual user behavior (technically speaking, it’s a reconstruction of user activity based on events that occur during a user session, which allows for both in-depth information gathering while still protecting sensitive data). That means you’re not seeing an aggregate view or series of assumptions. With session replay, you can be confident that you’re observing how real people interact with your content.
- Full context of the user journey: When using session replay, you’re seeing the whole story (not just a series of metrics), which might include moments of frustration with the user interface, confusion, or other friction points that tools like heatmaps alone can’t fully represent.
How Sprig Replays works
The daunting thing with session replay is that it can be a ton of data to sift through in order to draw the right insights. This is especially true if your recordings are all full-length user sessions.
And that’s where Sprig Replays comes in. Because you can set up your recording to trigger based on specific user actions or user attributes, Sprig Replays cut down the excess and provide you with exactly the context that you’re looking for. Rather than entire user sessions, the Sprig Replays tool gives you clips that capture what’s important, making it quicker and easier to draw actionable insights.
And on top of that, Sprig is the only tool on the market to offer AI Analysis of session recordings, meaning it can review and organize those replay clips into groups to uncover hidden patterns in your users’ product behavior. Here's what that looks like:
Replays results page in Sprig — Sprig AI instantly analyzes and groups session clips into themes to uncover patterns in your users' behavior.Strategies to scale session replay analysis with AI
Ok, so as we’ve discussed, Sprig Replays (including its AI Analysis) allows product managers to analyze user sessions more economically by capturing targeted clips based on attributes and actions and instantly grouping those clips into themes using AI.
By leveraging AI to do the heavy lifting, product managers can save hours previously spent watching every session recording and instead use the the themes uncovered by AI as a jumping off point for further investigation.
Here are some strategies and benefits to to scaling your session replay analysis:
Gain a holistic understanding of user experience
Whether you're a designer, product manager, or marketer, having a clear picture of how people are engaging with your application or website is critical. That’s why a session replay tool is not just a nice-to-have.
As we noted above, there’s no more valuable form of user data for understanding user experience than session replay — so consider that myth busted!
Analyze session replays more efficiently
With Sprig’s AI Analysis, you can gain valuable insights and a deeper understanding of trends much more quickly than with manual tools.
The individual session replays are always there should you want to look more granularly, but with Sprig’s AI analytics tools automatically creating clip categories based on themes around customer behavior, you’ve got a leg up when moving from collection to analysis.
Spot bugs and user issues faster
When debugging, AI speeds the process of session recording analysis. With Sprig’s AI-generated clip categories, you’re more likely to catch bugs, diagnose usability problems, and discover root causes faster.
This can make all the difference when it comes to customer support, enabling your product teams to make nimble decisions based on quantitative data.
Make smarter data-driven decisions
By building categories based on end user data and real customer interactions, Sprig’s AI analytics also help you not only view key trends or themes, but also prioritize those themes.
For example, you might have multiple pain points in your customer experience — Sprig’s AI helps identify those issues faster, allowing you to adjust your workflow or product roadmap to address the most pressing items first.
How to enhance session replay data with product analytics
Sprig Replay provides a deeper understanding of user engagement, and AI-generated themes help fill your dashboards with actionable insights. But it doesn’t stop there.
Product managers and UX researchers can get even more in-depth insights by referencing other product analytics tools, like surveys, heatmaps, and feedback features — all of which can be tied to session replays.
Surveys
Sprig Surveys offer an opportunity to engage with your users within the context of your website or app, providing quick and unobtrusive feedback channels for customers. Sprig’s AI-powered surveys not only help you build surveys and launch them faster, but also analyze your data in real-time as it comes in, making your user data more actionable.
Since they’re based on user input, these surveys can help clarify actions that may be difficult to interpret from session replay alone. In short, while session replay shows you exactly what happened, surveys get at why a user took a certain action, adding a qualitative layer to your user data.
The result is more detailed and nuanced user insights that help you discover intent, which you can leverage at any point along the customer journey.
Survey results page in Sprig — Sprig AI analyzes all responses to generate a study summary and key takeaways.Heatmaps
While Sprig Replays show you how an individual user interacts with your product, Sprig Heatmaps reveal overall behavior patterns based on cohorts of users, which you can define based on demographics or actions.
While heatmaps offer the 30,000-foot view of customer behavior by aggregating and displaying interaction data (like clicks, scrolling, and other engagement patterns), they can be used in tandem with Sprig Replays and AI Analysis to make your data more tangible and personal.
The results page of a Heatmap study in Sprig — including the AI Summary and heatmap, scrollmap, and clickmap data.Feedback
Sprig Feedback helps product managers capture customer feedback and get product recommendations at scale, creating opportunities to cross-check user-reported issues with session replays.
As with surveys and session replays, Sprig Feedback can be configured to trigger based on actions or demographics. And, as with surveys, these feedback tools are designed to be unobtrusive, and can be both built and analyzed with Sprig’s AI.
Tying feedback to session replays provides added insight into particular user behavior and helps inform prospective changes or updates.
Sprig AI automatically summarizes open-text Feedback study responses to give you actionable learnings and product optimizations.5 benefits of watching and analyzing session replays
Using Sprig Replays directly benefits product managers, marketers, and designers alike by helping them identify bugs and enhance the user experience faster, with the help of Sprig’s AI Analysis.
1. Improve user experience
Sprig Replays helps product teams improve the user experience because it’s build on real user data. This gives you and your team a deeper understanding of how your customers interact with your website or mobile app, and allows you to tailor your improvements to serve customer needs.
2. Identify points of friction
Session replays help you quickly identify pain points, frustration, and other functionality issues that may arise by surfacing data like rage clicks and error tracking. By addressing these problems more quickly and with targeted solutions based on the real needs of users, you can increase customer retention and reduce debugging time.
3. Increase conversion rates
Another important use case for session replays is conversion rate optimization. When you carefully analyze your session replays, and tie your replay data to heatmaps or feedback, you can gain deep insights into what is driving certain actions, and adjust your design to increase engagement and drive clicks to the right places.
4. Help support teams respond faster
Session replays allow support teams to quickly replay the user session that generated a support ticket, to view exactly what the customer experienced. This replay can then be surfaced directly to your product team to more quickly address bugs or usability problems, while hiding any sensitive information as needed.
As a result, this can help reduce support ticket times, again increasing user retention and allowing support teams to create more thorough documentation (which may cut down on the total number of support tickets going forward).
5. Validate user feedback with real data
As noted earlier, session replays are real user data. That means you can validate user feedback or survey information with actual user sessions, revealing whether there is a gap between what users say they are doing or experiencing and what they are actually doing.
6. Enhance A/B testing insights
Session replays allow you to observe how users interact with different versions of a page or product, adding a further layer or qualitative insights to quantitative datasets like heatmaps.
7. Reduce development time and costs
Since session replay allows you to see exactly what the issue or bug is that may be affecting the customer experience, you can make targeted fixes that reduce the drag on engineering and speed up time to market.
It also helps you reduce rework — the earlier in the development stages that you identify problems or usability issues, the less rework and redesign you’ll need to do in the future, cutting down on tech debt.
Sprig gives you a holistic picture of customer experience that scales
Combine Sprig Replays with AI analysis and feedback tools to give you a clear and holistic picture of user experience.
By bringing both qualitative and quantitative data together, you can zoom in or out on any problem — gain a deeper understanding of customer interactions on an individual level; or see how your session replay data aligns with your heatmap.
However you want to slice it, Sprig’s AI Analysis is constantly working to help you derive the most important insights from your data, allowing you to scale your approach to suit your growing business.
Sign up for free today to get started with Sprig and see how Sprig’s AI tools help you build successful products using feedback loops that scale.