What is the difference between session capture and session replay?

Session capture is the collection step: it gathers interaction and page-state data during a visit. Session replay is the analysis or playback experience that uses captured data to show an individual journey in a video-like format.

What does session capture record?

It can record or describe interactions such as page views, clicks, scrolls, taps, swipes, navigation, form activity, events, and errors. The exact data depends on the product, implementation, device, and privacy configuration.

Does session capture record a video of the user?

Not necessarily. Many systems collect structured interaction data and snapshots that can be rendered as a replay. This can look like a video while remaining different from a camera recording or a traditional screen recording.

Are all user sessions captured?

Not always. Capture may be targeted to selected URLs, events, or audiences, and browser settings, privacy tools, disabled cookies or storage, network restrictions, or technical policies can prevent some sessions from being collected. Contentsquare states that it captures the majority of sessions, but not necessarily 100% of visitors.

Can session capture be targeted?

Yes. Teams may target capture to specific events, URLs, segments, or moments of interest. Targeting can reduce the amount of data collected while concentrating analysis on important journeys, errors, feedback, or experiments.

How is privacy handled in session capture?

A responsible implementation masks or suppresses personal and sensitive information, limits who can access recordings, and follows applicable privacy requirements. Contentsquare describes automatic masking of personal information such as card and bank details and provides data-suppression settings.

How do teams use session capture to improve conversion?

Teams use it to explain where people abandon a journey, identify the behavior behind a failed interaction, and compare experiences across audiences or variants. Those findings can guide UX changes, bug fixes, content updates, and experiment decisions.

What are the limitations of session capture?

Captured sessions show observed behavior, not the user’s complete motivation. Collection can also be incomplete, privacy masking can hide some details, and a replay may not explain issues that occur outside the digital experience. Session capture works best alongside quantitative analytics, feedback, and technical diagnostics.

What is session capture?

Definition

Session capture is the process of collecting interaction data from a single user session. Depending on the implementation, the captured data can describe navigation, clicks, scrolls, taps, swipes, form interactions, page events, errors, and other signals that help reconstruct what a visitor experienced.

The captured information can then be analyzed in aggregate or connected to a session replay, which presents an individual journey in a video-like format. In Contentsquare, session capture settings can be turned on or off, and capture can be targeted to particular URLs or events rather than applied to every session.

Session capture is not necessarily a literal video recording of a person or their screen. Many tools collect structured interaction data and page-state information that can be replayed or analyzed, while privacy controls mask or suppress sensitive information.

What does that mean

Think of session capture as keeping a detailed, privacy-conscious trail of what someone did on a website or app. That trail helps a team retrace the journey without needing to guess what happened.

Why this matters

Session capture connects quantitative signals, such as drop-offs or errors, with the behaviors behind them. Marketing and Ecommerce teams can investigate conversion friction; Product and UX/UI teams can find confusing flows; and Data and IT teams can isolate patterns, technical problems, or affected segments.

Use cases

Understand friction in key journeys

For Product and UX/UI teams, a funnel, checkout, or onboarding flow may show that users are abandoning a step, but the metric alone does not explain why. Session capture records the actions around the drop-off so teams can see whether people are hesitating, repeating actions, overlooking controls, or encountering an unexpected state.

By examining captured journeys for relevant segments and linking the behavior to session replays, teams can form a more precise UX hypothesis. The expected benefit is a clearer path from “users are leaving” to a specific design, content, or interaction improvement.

Diagnose errors and reproduce user-impacting issues

Technical and functional errors are often difficult to understand from logs or an error count alone. Session capture preserves the surrounding user actions and context, which lets Product and IT teams investigate what happened before, during, and after an error.

Teams can filter or target captured sessions by error, audience, or event, then use a replay to inspect the affected journey. This can shorten diagnosis, help reproduce the issue, and focus fixes on problems that disrupt real customer experiences.

See it in practice

Co-op Food used Session Replay for a specific customer segment to review sessions, uncover what caused a payment-stage issue, and correct it. The story shows how captured behavior can provide the missing context behind a journey problem.

Validate feedback and experiments with observed behavior

Survey responses, support complaints, and A/B-test results can reveal that an experience needs attention without showing exactly how people interacted with it. Session capture lets Marketing and UX/UI teams connect that feedback or experiment segment to observed behavior.

Teams can compare sessions from different audiences or variants, look for repeated behaviors, and identify whether a change reduced friction or introduced a new obstacle. The expected benefit is stronger evidence for prioritization and iteration than feedback or conversion metrics can provide on their own.

How Contentsquare helps

Session Replay lets teams replay individual user journeys, including clicks, scrolls, taps, swipes, errors, and the moments that matter most.
Smart Capture captures interaction data automatically so teams can analyze behavior without relying on a manual tagging plan.
User Segmentation helps teams focus session analysis on defined audiences, behaviors, or user characteristics.
Error Analysis surfaces technical and functional errors and connects them to session replays so teams can investigate impact and prioritize fixes.
Heatmaps provides an aggregate view of clicks, scrolling, hovering, swiping, and typing, while related replays add individual-session context.

FAQs on session capture

Session capture is the collection step: it gathers interaction and page-state data during a visit. Session replay is the analysis or playback experience that uses captured data to show an individual journey in a video-like format.

Contentsquare x Škoda