Session replays are recordings of real user interactions with your product — every click, scroll, mouse movement, and form input captured and played back as a video. Unlike analytics dashboards that show you aggregated numbers, replays show you the full story of a single session: where someone hesitated, where they got confused, and where they gave up.
What gets recorded
A session replay does not capture video like a screen recorder. Instead, it captures a continuous snapshot of the DOM — the structure of the page — and replays those snapshots in sequence. This means the recording is lightweight, privacy-friendly, and perfectly synchronized with user events.
At a minimum, a replay captures:
- Mouse position and movement — including hover trails and idle periods
- Clicks and taps — with exact coordinates and the element targeted
- Scroll depth — how far down a user scrolled on each page
- Page navigation — every route change within a single-page app
- Form interactions — which fields were focused, how long they took, and whether they were abandoned
- Errors — JavaScript exceptions, network failures, and console warnings that occurred during the session
SessionSight also captures frustration signals automatically: rage clicks (repeated rapid clicks on the same element), dead clicks (clicks on non-interactive elements), and excessive scrolling (when a user scrolls back and forth repeatedly, a sign they cannot find something).
Why replays matter
Quantitative analytics can tell you that 40% of users drop off on your checkout page. What they cannot tell you is why. Did the form validation error message appear in a place no one noticed? Did the loading spinner spin for six seconds before giving up? Did a button appear disabled when it was not?
Replays answer the why. They compress hours of user testing into minutes of observation and surface problems that would take months to discover through A/B tests alone.
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How to use them effectively
Replays are most valuable when you watch them with a specific question in mind. A few approaches that work well:
Watch sessions from users who churned
If a user signed up and never came back, their replay often contains the moment things went wrong. Filter for sessions that ended without a key action — completing onboarding, creating a project, sending a campaign — and watch the last two minutes.
Watch sessions that triggered errors
SessionSight automatically tags replays where a JavaScript exception was thrown. These are almost always worth watching, because the error your monitoring tool caught often has a visible cause in the replay that the stack trace alone does not explain.
Watch sessions on pages with high exit rates
Your funnel data shows which pages lose the most users. Replays show you what those users were doing right before they left. Often it is something simple: a CTA that blends into the background, a form field with confusing placeholder text, or a loading state that looks like a finished state.
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Privacy and data sensitivity
Before you start recording, decide what not to capture. SessionSight masks sensitive fields by default — password inputs, credit card fields, and anything with type="password" — but you should also consider masking:
- Email addresses in forms
- Personal names
- Any field that contains health, financial, or government ID data
You can add the data-ss-mask attribute to any element to exclude it from replays entirely. Masked elements appear as a solid block in the recording, preserving the layout without exposing the content.
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What to do after watching
A replay is not a deliverable — it is a starting point. When you find something worth acting on, the workflow is:
- Tag the session so teammates can watch the same moment
- File a specific issue — not “checkout is confusing” but “the error message on the email field appears below the fold on mobile, so users submit without seeing it”
- Verify the fix by watching the same flow after deployment
The goal is not to watch every replay. It is to watch the right ones, extract a clear problem statement, and close the loop with a measurable change.
Session replays work best alongside the other tools in your stack. Pair them with funnels to identify where to look, with heatmaps to validate what you see, and with A/B tests to confirm that your fix actually worked.