Hours of meticulous planning, endless iterations, and a great deal of coffee—that's the kind of effort that goes into creating and launching a website. After all that you've gone through, it's natural to get carried away and think your website will change the fate of your business overnight—that every visitor will interact with it the way you planned. But the truth is visitors are unpredictable.
If you consider your website to be a conversion-puller, you have to observe how visitors engage with it and guide them into taking the desired actions. As the adage goes, "seeing is believing." This is exactly where session recording comes into play and—most importantly—helps keep your inherent bias off the table.
In this blog, we'll talk about session recording—a tool that not only tells you what's deterring your visitors from converting but also helps you understand why they behave in a certain way.
What's session recording?
Session recording is a video rendering of actions your visitors perform on your website. It shows how visitors interact with it—how they scroll, where they click, their mouse movements, and more.
For those who need to see this in action, here's a video to get you familiarized with session recording:
Now let's look at ways session recordings can facilitate a smooth visitor-to-customer transition.
Analyze visitor behavior
Visitors are the linchpin to your website's success, don't you think? For this very reason, you have to experience your website through their eyes. Session recording shows how visitors engage with your website—areas of your page they spend a significant amount of time on, the time they take to reach your call-to-action (CTA) section, sections they ignore, and more. This will help you discover why visitors do what they do and make fine adjustments to your website. Say your CTA doesn't get the attention it deserves—you could perhaps move it to the section that already attracts your visitor's eyeballs.
Design an effective conversion funnel
Every marketing effort is aimed at bringing traffic to the website and converting visitors into customers. So, it's vital you define a conversion funnel—the path a visitor has to take in order to become your customer. Session recording brings the entire buyer journey in front of your eyes. You can see how visitors navigate through your website, identify their browsing pattern tab-to-tab, and discover pages that break the pattern. With this information, you can rethink your conversion funnel and design one that helps visitors dodge distractions and get to the end of your funnel with ease.
Identify UI/UX flaws and fix them
Broken CSS, error pages, unresponsive design, latency—these can be real show stoppers for your visitors. The sad part is, we often won't notice these until someone flags them. Most websites have a few hundred pages, so it becomes almost impossible for you to monitor these issues on a daily basis. This is where session recording can save you time and effort—you can watch a few recordings and uncover glitches that impede your visitors from taking action on your page.
Spot friction in forms and optimize them for conversions
Nothing can hurt you more than seeing your visitors give up on you and drop off at the last moment. Session recording can help spot the friction in your lead-gen forms—you can identify fields that cause drop-off, the ones people don't fill, or, worse, discover a form breakage. For instance, if you see a drop in the form submissions, pull out a recording and watch how visitors fill out forms. Chances are a visitor is repeatedly filling the password field and the form does not progress. You can tackle this by adding a simple password validation error message.
Deliver exceptional support to your visitors
Picture this: A visitor comes to your pricing page, goes to the FAQs page, and then comes back to the pricing page. They are repeating this pattern a couple of times and then exiting your site. This visitor might be a high-intent buyer who is not able to find an important piece of information on your site. That is a bad experience, and bad user experience always casts a cloud over your conversions. You might lose these visitors if you don't proactively offer support—your live chat can help in this regard to an extent. However, you might not understand where visitors get stuck if they are not able to explain it to you better.
In situations like these, combining the power of your live chat tool with session recording is half the battle won. You can now watch the visitor's recording, see where they are stuck, guide them accordingly, and win them over. Simply put, session recording helps you pacify disgruntled visitors and turn them into happy customers.
Recap
With session recording in place, you can:
Understand website visitor behavior
Rethink and redesign your marketing strategies
Easily identify UI/UX breaks and fix them
Optimize website forms and improve conversion rates
See where people get stuck on your website and offer support
Note
- Session recording only captures anonymized data. That means email addresses or names of your visitors will not be recorded.
- Session recording does not capture any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) such as usernames and passwords. It's completely GDPR-compliant.
- It allows you to explicitly add a banner on your site to inform visitors that you collect their cookie information for marketing purposes.
So what are you waiting for? Try session recording today and let us know your experience in the comments section below. Feel free to drop in questions you might have, too!
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