What is Session replay?
Session replay is a technology that records and plays back individual user sessions on a website or app, showing every mouse movement, click, scroll, keystroke, and page navigation as a video-like reconstruction.
How it works
Session replays are assembled from event data (not actual video recordings), making them lightweight to store and GDPR-manageable with proper data masking. They are provided by tools like FullStory, Hotjar, and LogRocket. Replays are most valuable for diagnosing specific usability problems identified by analytics: if a funnel shows 40% drop-off at step 3, watching session replays of users who dropped off reveals why (rage clicking on an unresponsive element, confusion about a form field, slow page load causing abandonment). Session replays bridge the gap between quantitative analytics (what happened) and qualitative understanding (why it happened).
Applied example
Analytics show a 50% form abandonment rate at the address field. Session replays reveal users repeatedly typing their address, getting an autocomplete suggestion, clicking it, and having the field clear and reset. The bug is invisible in analytics but immediately obvious in replays, leading to a fix that drops abandonment to 15%.
Why it matters
Session replays provide direct observation of individual user struggles, turning abstract analytics anomalies into concrete, observable, fixable usability problems.
