Session Recording (Premium Feature)
Session recordings allow you to record all activity on a page by a real visitor, such as clicks, mouse movements, screen scrolls, window resizing, page changes and form interactions. You can replay these interactions in a video to see exactly how a visitor interacted with your website. This way, you understand their expectations, problems that may have, usage patterns, and more to optimize your site and maximize its success.
Create and manage session recordings
Before your users' sessions can be recorded, you need to create a session recording.
To get to the Manage Session Recordings screen, click on Control Panel and then “Session Recordings” and then Manage session recordings. No developer knowledge is required to configure any of the session recordings and you don't need to adjust the code on your website. When you manage your session recordings, the user interface always explains detail each step and it will literally only take a few seconds to set up session recording.
Creating and editing a session recording
To record new sessions, click “Create new session recording” in the bottom left corner. To edit a session recording, just click the edit icon next to the name of a previously created recording.
When creating or editing a session recording, all you need to do is set a name for the recording. Additionally, you can choose to record activities only on a specific landing page or pages. To do this, choose between attributes and comparisons “URL”, “URL path”, “URL parameter” such as “equals”, “starts with”, “contains”, “matches regular expression” and more. The validator next to the landing page allows you to test easily if the page you want to match actually matches the pages you want to record your users' sessions on.
Advanced options
When setting up a session recording, you can optionally set advanced options such as:
- Record a session only if the user clicks and scrolls (requires activity);
- Only record sessions if they spent at least a certain time on your website page (Minimum session time);
- Disable recording of keystrokes that the user enters into text form fields (capture keystrokes);
- Define how many sessions should be recorded (Number of sessions);
- How likely a user is to be registered (sampling rate).
As always, the meaning of each option is clearly explained in the user interface.
Track activity on only a portion of my visitors
You can define a so-called Sampling Rate, which can vary from 0.1% to 100%. If you choose, for example, 10%, only every 10th page view will be recorded, and so on.
How can I target specific pages when setting up a heatmap or session recording?
The feature allows you to define page rules based on “URL”, “URL path” and “URL parameter”.
To match a specific value, you can select different comparisons like “equals simple”, “equals exactly”, “starts with”, “contains”, “matches a regular expression”, “does not equal simple” and more.
When you choose “equals simple”, the protocol (http or https) and any URL parameters and trailing slashes in a path are ignored, allowing you to more easily match different versions of a page URL. On the contrary, when selecting “equals exactly”, the value must match exactly.
You will need to define each page you want to crawl.
How can I ensure that my configured landing pages actually match the URL I want to record?
To ensure that your defined landing page rules match the URL of the page you want to record, use the URL validator displayed next to your landing page rules. When you enter the URL into the URL validator, you will see whether the URL you entered would match the page rules or not.
How do I avoid idle recording sessions?
When setting up a session recording, you can choose whether a session should only be recorded if there is at least one click and one scroll. This is enabled by default so you don't have recordings without actions.
If you also want to play recordings with just one click, just one scroll, or no activity, please disable this setting under Session Recordings >> Manage.
How do I play back a recorded session?
As soon as you set up a session recording, MVMCloud Analytics will start tracking your visitors' activities so you can play them back in a video. To replay these activities, log into MVMCloud Analytics and select “Session Recordings” followed by the name of your configured session recording.
You will see a list of all recorded sessions, including information on when they were recorded, how long they spent on the page, visitors' viewport resolution, location, device, operating system, and browser. To play such a video, hover over a session recording line and select the large play button.
