Session Replay
Conversion & UXAlso: Session Recording · User Session Recording
Quick definition
Session replay is a tool that records a real visitor's on-page behaviour and plays it back like a video. It captures mouse movement, clicks, scrolling and form interaction so you can watch exactly what a user did on your site, without seeing their actual keystrokes or personal data if configured properly.
How it varies across Australia
Session replay adoption sits well below heatmap and analytics tool adoption across Australian mid-market sites. Where it is used, it tends to cluster around checkout and lead-form pages rather than being deployed site-wide.
See conversion and UX benchmarks across Australian industries →What it actually means
Session replay is the closest thing marketing has to watching over someone's shoulder while they use your site. Instead of aggregated numbers, you get a single, specific human clicking, scrolling, hesitating and eventually leaving or converting.
This is where session replay earns its keep and where it gets overused. It's brilliant for diagnosis. You've seen a drop in conversion rate on a form and you don't know why. Ten replays later you notice everyone hesitates on the same field. That's not something a bounce rate or a funnel report will tell you.
It's terrible for measurement. Watching twenty sessions doesn't tell you what percentage of your traffic hits the same problem. That's a job for analytics and a-b testing, not for replay. Session replay answers 'what happened' for individuals. It doesn't answer 'how often' at scale.
The tool sits alongside heatmaps and user-experience research as a qualitative layer over your quantitative data. Used together, replay explains the anomaly your conversion-rate dashboard flagged but couldn't diagnose.
A heatmap tells you where people clicked. Session replay tells you why they gave up before they got there.
How it shows up
Session replay shows up as a small recording widget embedded via a tag manager script, usually alongside heatmap and analytics tags. In practice it surfaces during conversion-rate investigations, after a call-to-action redesign, or when a form's completion rate drops and nobody can explain why from the analytics alone. It's rarely used as a daily dashboard. It's used as a diagnostic tool pulled out when a specific number looks wrong.
The Australian context
Session replay tools capture user behaviour, and depending on configuration, that can include personal information typed into forms. Under the Privacy Act, businesses need clear consent and masking of sensitive fields like payment details, health information and passwords before recording. Most reputable tools mask these by default but the setting needs verifying, not assuming. A misconfigured recording that captures unmasked personal data is a genuine compliance exposure, not just a bad look.
Where people get this wrong
Related terms
Common questions
Is session replay the same as a heatmap?
No. A heatmap aggregates behaviour across many visitors into a single visual, showing where clicks or attention cluster. Session replay shows one visitor's individual journey in sequence. Heatmaps answer patterns across many. Replay answers what happened to one.
Does session replay capture what people type?
Reputable tools mask form inputs and sensitive fields by default, showing that something was typed without recording the actual content. This setting should always be verified, particularly for password, payment and personal information fields, since misconfiguration creates privacy risk.
How many sessions should I watch to find a problem?
There's no fixed number. Start with the sessions that match a specific symptom, like abandoned carts or failed form submissions. A handful of matching sessions, often five to ten, is usually enough to spot a recurring pattern worth investigating further.
Can session replay replace analytics?
No. Analytics tells you how often something happens across your whole audience. Session replay tells you what it looked like for a specific visitor. Use analytics to find where the problem is, then use replay to understand why it's happening there.
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About New Rebellion
New Rebellion is a marketing intelligence consultancy. We build tools, score Australian businesses on how their marketing actually performs, and publish Debrief every day. This dictionary is part of how we work in the open.
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