Session recording entails monitoring internet user behavior on your website. Session recording involves recording and observing visitor behavior on your website. Such as the pages they check, the time spent, items transferred to their shopping carts, mouse click and scrolls, and all the general movements of visitors while using your webpage.

Visitor's bounce on your website occurs when a visitor is not satisfied with the content of your website or is uninterested in your website. It could be the template arrangement, it could be that your website loads pages slowly or other bad features and the only way to identify the reasons for this bounce is by recording your visitor sessions.

When you can record every activity on your website, at the end of the day, when you analyze the visitor recordings, you would be able to identify ways to improve your website, understand visitor's behaviour on your website, and serve them better. If you do not know the root of a problem, such as a visitor bounce on your website, you might be unable to tackle the problem; and correct the cause of the bounce.

The Key Components of Session Recording

1. Conversion Funnels

According to Oberlo, the conversion funnel involves four stages; awareness, interest, desire, and action. The conversion funnel defines the flow of prospective customers to paying customers. A conversion funnel is a powerful tool in analyzing visitor recordings on a website. It allows a web marketer to define the pages that lead toward a goal, such as a purchase or signup.

In a survey by Hubspot in 2018, only 69% of marketers feel their top priority should be converting leads into customers (conversion funnel).

Conversion funnels enable you to watch visitor recordings when they are done going through the website, identify where such visitors dropped off or left the webpage, or backed out in making a purchase or signing up. Conversion funnels allow you to identify where and why prospects lose interest in achieving a goal on the website after setting out to achieve that goal and enable you to work on such a barrier to reduce visitor bounce and increase conversions.

When you can identify the problem and work on it, you have succeeded in removing the obstacle that prevents previous prospects from making a purchase or signing up, which is the goal they set to achieve by checking your website. This is one of the benefits of conversion funnels in visitor monitoring.

2. Heatmap Software

Heatmap software is the tool that enables you to identify where visitors on your website are looking at. Heatmap software shows that particular page or section on your website where internet users spend more time going through. The heatmap software identifies this center of attention by visualizing the mouse movements on the website. The area where your visitor recording shows that users spend more time there; the heatmap software identifies and analyzes.

It could be a button, an image, a text, or a link that redirects them to a subdomain. For online stores, it could be the “buy now” button that has more clicks, and it could be the “discount prices and freebies” button. So when your visitor recording and heatmap software shows that a large number of visitors clicked and spent more time on the “discount prices and freebies,” but few of them made the purchase even with the discount, you can be able to identify whether the products such users are looking for are unavailable in the discount and freebies” package or the discount price is still on the high side, you can therefore increase the discount percentage or add more products to the discount session.

The heatmap software also shows you how far people are scrolling on your webpage. Whether the visitors made it to the end of your website or closed the website at the middle of the page, if the heatmap software shows that most visitors do not scroll beyond the middle of the website, you can insert the essential content of the website at the top or in the middle. For instance, an online store whose heat map software shows that the majority of the website visitors do not scroll past the middle; you can put your “purchase button” or “add to cart” button right in the middle of the webpage.

Also, heatmap software and screen recording show where your website visitor spends more time; you can also put the essential content on this page. It could be the home page, the landing page, or other linked pages.

3. Web Analytics

Web analytics is another important component in session recording. Web analytics involves the gathering, reporting, and analysis of website data to meaningful information.

In your website session recording, web analytics is used as a tool to show the website data and assess the strength and weaknesses of websites. The generated report or data in web analytics are used in improving website effectiveness and improve traffic generation.

In a layman language, Web analytics provides data and information on the number of visitors to a website, the time spent on the website, the page with the highest views, and other important activities carried out on the website. In this tweet by Cloudflare, you can discover what is slowing down your website with web analytics.

Web analytics also helps to compare and analyze changes on your website over a while. For example, when you launch a new advertising campaign for your online store, web analytics helps you to know whether the campaign yielded more sales and generated more traffic to your website compared to those periods before the ads campaign.

Having explained the basic components of session recording and how they help reduce visitor bounce, it is pertinent to highlight the visitor tools and software that makes it easy to monitor user’s activities on the website to reduce visitor bounce. These tools and software include,

1. Site Recording.com

Site Recording is the best session recording operating system available. Its features and functionalities surpass all other visitor recording tools. Asides from the fact that it helps to monitor user activity on your website, it also helps to analyze these visitor recordings and generate the necessary results to help reduce visitor bounce.

Site Recording has the session replay feature that allows you to replay the recorded sessions as many time as possible and fully understand what your visitor wants and how to serve them better.

Site Recording has the heatmap software functionalities, the conversion funnel, and web analytics tools to help you properly monitor your website and eliminate visitor bounce.

2. Hot jar

The hot jar is a visitor recording software that a web marketer uses in recording and watching what users see and do on your website. Hot jar allows you to record all pages on your website simultaneously or record a particular page of interest to the web developer. This session recording tool allows you to share the visitor recordings with your team members, tag the video recordings, search and filter your recordings.

Hotjar can be used for session recording on websites such as WordPress, Shopify, Joomla, Magento, Drupal, and a host of others.

3. UXtweak

UXTweak is a session recording tool that indexes all website user’s events and shows their activities on your website. UXtweak has a smart search filter that filters out the specific video recordings from the whole recording. It could be a page among all the web pages in a website that you want to filter out; it could be a certain period when there is an increased influx of visitors to your webpage.

This visitor recording software also suggests how to improve your website and reduce visitor bounce.

4. Inspectlet

Inspectlet is another session recording application that allows you to record only 100 sessions per month on its free trial plan. You can filter these visitor recordings and save them in a permanent storage device. Inspectlet also notifies you and prioritizes sessions from a returning user of your website by identifying their IP address or device used.

5. Smartlook

Smart Look is another visitor recording software that helps you record and analyze users' behaviour and activities on your webpage. It can also be used to track user activities on mobile applications. Smart Look also has a conversion funnel that enables you to analyze visitor recordings and identify how to turn potential customers into paying customers and reduce visitor bounce.

6. Clicktale

Clicktale allows you to monitor session recording, replay these recordings, see how your visitors interact with your website, and record a certain area or page on your website instead of the whole screen or all the pages. This session recording tool allows you to filter the recorded sessions based on demographics, traffic source, possible user location, and a host of other details.

7. AB tasty

While other session recording application helps you to monitor and track visitors’ activities on your website, AB tasty helps you to analyze these recordings and generate useful information from the recorded data. For visitor recordings that are passive useless and contain few visitor interactions, you can set this video recording software to filter it out and present the ones with numerous interactions on your website.

Conclusion

As said earlier that session recording entails visitor recordings on your website; it is important to know that these visitor recordings can only be done by software and tools that have been developed for these purposes. You have to integrate them into your website and configure them to carry out visitor recordings.

The recorded sessions and activities on your website are saved without context in data form; the web marketer would analyze it and find ways to reduce visitor bounce. Except for powerful software such as SiteRecording.com developed by 500apps that has the conversion funnel, web analytics, and heat map software to independently monitor, track and analyze the session recordings to give insightful information on generating more traffic to your website and reduce visitor bounce.