Session Replay and Heatmaps
Watch recorded visits and see where people click and how far they scroll
Written By David
Last updated About 3 hours ago
Included from Starter.
Your analytics tell you a page underperforms. Session Replay shows you why: it records visits to your website so you can play them back, and builds click and scroll heatmaps for each page from those visits. Text and form fields are masked in the visitor's browser before anything is sent to Cromojo.
Turn it on
Go to Settings > Analytics and open the Session Replay section.
Switch on Record visits.
Visit your website in another tab, then come back after you leave it. The visit appears once it ends.
Session Replay uses the Cromojo tracking script you already installed. There's nothing to add to your website. You can review the masking and recording settings below before or after you switch it on.
Watch a recorded visit
Go to Web Analytics > Session Replay. Each row is one visit, newest first, with when it started, the visitor, country, device, browser, number of pages and clicks, duration, and the entry and exit pages.
Press Play to watch it. You see the page as the visitor saw it, with mouse movement, clicks, scrolling and page changes in order. You can pause, scrub the timeline and change the speed. Markers on the timeline show page changes and your custom events.
You can also open the recordings of a page straight from the Pages report.
Find the visits that matter
Use the filters to narrow the list:
Pages: any page visited, entry page, exit page.
Visitor: country, device, browser, operating system, or one visitor.
Traffic source: channel, referrer, UTM source, medium and campaign.
Behaviour: rage clicks, U-turns (a visitor who goes straight back), JavaScript errors and scroll depth.
Results: custom event fired, goal completed, or visits that converted.
Length: duration, pages viewed and number of clicks.
A good place to start: visits with rage clicks or JavaScript errors on your checkout or signup pages, and visits from your best channel that didn't convert.
Heatmaps
Go to Web Analytics > Heatmaps, pick a page and a device (desktop or mobile, tablets included). You get two maps for the date range:
Click map: where visitors clicked, drawn over a snapshot of the page.
Scroll map: the share of visitors who reached each part of the page.
Each heatmap shows how many visits it is built from. Heatmaps only use recorded visits, so a page needs some recorded traffic before its maps are useful.
Control what gets recorded
All these settings are in Settings > Analytics > Session Replay. Changes apply to new visits only.
Masking level
Strict: hides all text, images and link addresses. You still see the layout, clicks and scrolling.
Balanced (default): shows words and images. Hides numbers and email addresses. Amounts with a currency sign and link addresses stay visible.
Relaxed: shows all page text, numbers included.
Always mask and May show
Add CSS selectors to Always mask to hide the text, images and links inside those elements at every level. With Balanced masking, elements on May show are shown in full, numbers included. You can also mark elements in your own code with data-cromojo-mask or data-cromojo-unmask.
Excluded pages, share of visits and consent
Excluded pages: pages that are never recorded, such as an account area.
Share of visits recorded: visits are picked at random. 100% records every visit. Lower it to make your monthly allowance last longer.
Record only after consent: uses the consent state your site reports to Cromojo. Your tracking code must include your consent mode, or no visit is recorded.
Privacy
Masking happens in the visitor's browser, so masked content never reaches Cromojo. The recording adds no cookies and no local storage.
Always hidden, at every masking level:
What visitors type into form fields and text editors, passwords included.
What is inside frames from other websites, such as an embedded payment form or video.
Never recorded:
Pages on your Excluded pages list, and pages you hide from your dashboards.
Visitors whose browser sends Global Privacy Control, and visitors who decline consent.
Bots and automated browsers.
The full list of what a recording may include is shown under What recordings hide in the Session Replay settings.
Allowance and retention by plan
When the month's allowance is used up, recording pauses until the next month and the settings show when it resumes. Your existing recordings stay available. Recordings are deleted when your plan's retention period ends.
FAQ
Does Session Replay slow down my website? It runs from the tracking script you already have and uploads in the background.
I switched it on but see no recordings. A visit shows once it ends. Check that the tracking script is installed and verified, that the page isn't on your Excluded pages list, and, if Record only after consent is on, that your tracking code includes your consent mode.
Can my team watch recordings? Yes. Workspace members and guests with access to the site can watch them. Only the site owner and workspace members can change the settings or delete a recording.
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