Session Recordings: How To Conduct User Analysis

Session recordings offer a window into your site's real-world usage, capturing every tap, scroll, and click across all pages and screens.

But you can miss crucial insights during playback reviews if you lack a structured approach to recording analysis.

Which is why today, we’re walking you through six easy steps that’ll give you actionable insight from your session recording analysis.

Note: we’ll walk through this piece using Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool, but the approach should be relatively similar with whatever tool you use.

1. Get ready for a ‘watch’ session

Before you start watching recordings of user sessions, you need to ‘get in the zone’ and create a focused watching environment.

Here’s how:

Find a place where you can spend 1–2 uninterrupted hours

It usually takes about 10–15 recordings to get into a good watching flow, and the task is faster and more efficient when you can avoid distractions or interruptions.

There isn’t just one way to watch recordings—after talking to several Contentsquare users (ourselves included) we’ve heard of people binge-watching from their sofa, locking themselves in a meeting room, and even reviewing recordings while power-walking on a treadmill(!).

Whatever your favorite viewing location is, make sure it helps you (and your team) stay focused on the watching task. It might help if you book a recurring two-hour slot in your calendar every couple of weeks, so you get into the habit of watching regularly.

Prepare everything you need to take notes

You will likely want to take notes about what you are noticing while you watch recordings. Again, you have different options:

• A simple sheet of paper to jot down your notes

• Color Post-it® notes if you want to color-code your observations

• A spreadsheet if you want to type and share your notes quickly

• A Trello board (or any equivalent) for collaborative watching

How to take notes using Post-its®: pink ones for the site page + yellow for each issue spotted on it.

You can then copy and paste (or hand write) the URL of each recording and add it to your notes to refer back when needed.

2. Define the goal of your watching session

Whether you have tens or thousands of recordings to go through, start by identifying what you want to get out of your watching session. Knowing what you want to achieve helps you determine which recordings to start with.

Here are the four most frequent goals we encounter through user analysis:

1. Find out where people are hesitating or getting stuck on an ecommerce website

If you own or work for an ecommerce website, focusing your attention on the checkout process usually helps you see how people progress (or fail to progress) through it, and hypothesize what may be causing them to leave.

2. Understand how to improve a SaaS product and its features

By looking at recordings of how people really use your product/service, you are very likely to empathize with your users as they experience friction and spot opportunities for change and improvement.

3. See where people get stuck on a lead generation website or page

On websites or landing pages whose primary function is getting someone’s contact details, you can be laser-focused on visitors who fail to complete your forms and the customer journey they took before getting to the form in the first place.

Tip: Use Contentsquare’s Form Analysis tool with session recordings to get even deeper insight to optimize forms.

4. Find bugs and opportunities for improvement

Watching visitors move around pages and experience failure points (e.g. an error) helps you formulate clear plans to fix issues, remove barriers, and make the overall digital experience more efficient and enjoyable.

Then, pair your recordings with Contentsquare’s Error Analysis tool to identify errors and understand what’s causing them before they become problems.

3. Use your goal to narrow down the data

Once you know what you want to get out of your watching session, you’re ready to start watching recordings.

If you have a small number of recordings, you might decide to watch all of them. But if you have thousands, you’ll need a way to filter and organize the relevant ones. Here are some tips depending on your goals:

1. Find out where people are hesitating or getting stuck on an ecommerce website

One of the first steps to understanding why people are hesitating or getting stuck on an ecommerce website is to analyze their behavior. If you don’t have any analytics tools in place, you can still gain valuable insights by using a sorting function to watch visitor recordings.

By sorting these recordings based on longer journeys—either by time spent or the number of pages visited—you can observe how visitors navigate through the site. This often involves watching them go back and forth between pages or screens, interact with various elements, and, eventually, drop off. These patterns can reveal areas of friction and help paint a bigger picture of how users engage with your website before they decide to leave.

Tip: use Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer to trigger exit-intent surveys that ask people why they leave pages with high bounce rates.

If you have analytics, you can focus on where visitors abandon their journey. Use an exit page filter, input the problem page’s URL, and review recordings to target bottlenecks.

If internal data points to an issue within a specific timeframe, use the date range filter to narrow down sessions. This also works for device-, browser-, or country-specific issues using related filters.

Lastly, track key actions like "cart" or "checkout" by adding custom event tracking. This allows you to filter and review recordings of users performing these actions.

For example, your dev team can create custom events for actions like "cart" or "checkout." Then, you can filter recordings based on these events.

2. Understand how to improve a SaaS product and its features

To improve a SaaS product and its features, first ensure that you’re tracking key user actions through custom events. Once events are set up for all important actions—such as creating a poll or downgrading a plan—you can filter by these events to review specific user behaviors.

Watching recordings tied to these actions provides direct insight into how people are interacting with your tool, offering a reality check on user experience versus your assumptions.

Additionally, sorting user sessions by the longest visits or the highest number of pages visited can give you a clearer picture of how users truly engage with your product.

This approach helps you understand which features or sections capture the most attention and where users might encounter friction or confusion. By focusing on these areas, you can identify opportunities to optimize the product, streamline user journeys, and enhance the overall experience.

3. See where people get stuck on a lead generation website or page

To identify where users get stuck on a lead generation website, start by filtering journeys that involve your form. Use the visited page filter and add the form’s URL to watch how people interact with it—or don’t. This can reveal potential issues with the form itself or the path leading up to it.

Next, filter by device, browser, or operating system to spot technical issues. Compare sessions from mobile versus desktop or across browsers like Chrome and Safari. This helps you identify whether problems are platform-specific, allowing for more targeted fixes to improve your conversion rates.

4. Find bugs and opportunities for improvement

If you want to validate bug fixes, combine the errors filter with other segmentation—like a user’s browser, device type, or the specific elements they click on the page—to understand if those errors still occur. It’s a much easier alternative to trying to reproduce a bug.

If you're in charge of managing a website, sort by longest visit or highest number of pages visited to watch recordings of visitors who see multiple pages/screens and find anything broken that needs fixing.

4. Know what to spot when you watch

Now that you’ve defined your goals and narrowed down the recordings you have to watch, you’re ready to press play.

You usually need 10–20 recordings to get in a good viewing flow, after which you should be able to start seeing patterns and develop an understanding of where users hesitate or get confused, and what leads them to abandon your site.

Finally, start making notes whenever you see something interesting, unusual, or that needs further investigation.

Pro tip: combine session recordings with another great qualitative behavior analytics tool like Heatmaps to validate or disprove assumptions, as they help you visualize data from website visitors in aggregate.

Look at how people interact with your website or app

If the purpose of your watching session is to see and understand how people experience your website or app,

• Check what element(s) visitors use to navigate from one page to another → if users don’t click or tap where you expect them to or it takes them a while to progress, it may be that page elements and CTAs are distracting or unclear

• Review how visitors interact with buttons or clickable elements → if they exhibit unusual behavior, such as tapping or clicking repeatedly on an element when nothing happens, you may need to check if your elements are broken or if your design is confusing people

• Notice how much time it takes to perform a specific action → if you see people scrolling a lot through a page or screen and moving their mouse around erratically before committing to an action, you might need to investigate if they have all the information they need to continue

• Compare recordings of people who completed an action successfully vs. those who did not → check if you can spot any glaring differences in their respective journeys

Look for bugs, issues or glitches

If the purpose of your watching session is to identify problems on your website or app that need fixing, look out for

• Compatibility bugs that make the page(s) load incorrectly across different devices and/or browsers

• Functionality bugs that cause the website/app to not do something it should (example: log in not working, search functionality not returning results)

• Layout and design bugs that make elements of a page render incorrectly (example: usability issues on mobile devices)

Pro Tip: Use Contentsquare’s Frustration Scoring to prioritize fixes. Frustration Scoring automatically ranks sessions where users encountered issues. This way, you can easily find recordings with areas of friction—no need to sift through hours of replays.

5. Add comments to your recordings so you can find them later

As you watch your recordings and start spotting themes or interesting elements, you can use built-in functionality to add comments to the interesting parts of your recordings to easily find the same spot later.

6. Find your first win(s)

At the end of your watching session, you should have a clear list of things to fix, improve, investigate, or change. The final thing to do is decide which one(s) you are going to tackle first.

One way to make this decision easier is ask yourself these questions:

• How much research will be required to understand the situation in depth?

• How much time/money/effort will it cost to implement a fix or deploy a change (including the time spent planning and getting approval for the fix itself, not just its implementation)?

• How much will this fix/change improve the customer experience on your website?

• How many people will be affected by it?

If you prioritize your list based on these parameters, you’ll be able to pick the highest improvement, highest impact, or fastest and easiest deployment solution(s) you need to start from.

Usually, these will be related to bugs, broken elements, or really obvious obstacles that make the user journey across your site or mobile app impossible or extremely difficult. Those quick wins can have a major impact on your retention and conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts.

Later on, you will likely focus on research-based tasks to understand the context around other situations you may have spotted. You can accumulate endless data points about something that doesn’t work, but knowing what is going on is only half of the battle. To get to the root of the problem and find a solution, you will need to understand the why.

This is where you can run advanced research by using a choice of customer tools, like Surveys which allow you to collect feedback from your users: these people have all the information you need about the problem they are facing and also the key to its solution.

Analyze users from session recordings

These six steps make it simple to analyze session recordings and extract valuable insight into user behavior on your website or app.

And after watching only a handful of recordings, you’ll be closer to knowing what undiscovered bugs your site has and why people leave without converting.

So, grab your popcorn, get comfy, and start watching those replays.