When building your optimisation roadmap and planning tests, a session replay tool can be a helpful partner in that journey.
In this post, we will explore five ways that you can use a session replay tool to support your testing ideas, view real-life optimised sessions and maximise your results.
1. Friction points
Session replay tools are useful to provide the evidence needed to back your testing ideas.
Looking at factors such as high struggle/ friction sessions can provide insights into areas that your customers may be finding tricky. You can either start with a specific page in mind, or a more general site overview. It’s likely that you’ve become so accustomed to the way your site works, it can be difficult to spot errors or struggle points – much like marking your own homework!
Once a struggle point is identified on a specific page and after watching a handful of sessions, it can be possible to develop new test ideas.
For example, if you saw several checkout sessions where customers were dropping off before seeing the payment CTA (Call To Action), this could inform you that perhaps the CTA needs to be made more obvious – this could be the foundation for a new test idea.
2. Zone Analysis
Another method for test ideation can be found in zone or page analysis tools within session replay. These reports inform you, amongst many other metrics, which areas of your page are being clicked on the most and which areas are converting the best. This information can be key to focus on specific parts of your page that might need improvement.
For example, from zoning, you may find that a key CTA is receiving very little traction, this could be the basis for an ABn test where the CTA copy is amended to improve interaction.
As well as test ideas, zone analysis can be a good place to compare and contrast your test results – as well as using Webtrends Optimize to measure key conversion metrics, you can use zone/page analysis to support your Webtrends Optimize results.
3. Heat Maps
Heat mapping provides a clear image of where your visitors are using your site. It is not only one of the simplest areas of session replay tools to use, it also can give you really quick insights. Combining the findings of zone/page analysis with heatmaps can help provide a full picture of visitor behaviour on specific pages.
Using elements such as scroll-depth heatmaps, means you can begin to paint a picture of which areas of your pages are most engaged with. You can then use these learnings to focus your tests and page changes.
For example, if a key ‘sign up’ button is placed too far below the fold, you may find that visitors simply don’t scroll far enough to reach it. By understanding where your visitors scroll to, you can then determine that moving the CTA and optimising its position (through testing) will be valuable.
4. Conversion Funnels
For any site journey which counts as a conversion, such as registration, form completion or checkout, funnel analysis provides plenty of key insights.
Understanding where visitor pain points are, and where they’re dropping out of your journey gives you the information needed to start making site improvements. Watching drop-off sessions are likely to show clear patterns of struggle, helping to inform you where improvements could be made – this information would then form the basis for new test ideas.
An example could be, that you see multiple drop offs on the address field of your delivery page, due to struggles with an auto-complete function. This information could inspire a test to see if drop off is lower (and conversion higher) if the rules around auto-completion were tweaked.
5. Session Analysis
Typically, all session replay reports point back to watching sessions. Watching sessions allows you to see what your visitors are really doing on your site, taking away the guess work.
Using a combination of the discussed methods can help you focus where to spend time and watch sessions.
By integrating Webtrends Optimize with your session replay tool, you can easily find tests that you are currently running. This is a great opportunity to analyse real examples of your customers in both the control and test environment. Watching sessions allows you to clearly see how real customers interact with your test, also giving you the opportunity to improve your hypotheses.
Optimising your user experience
Webtrends Optimize currently have push button connectors with:
- Contentsquare
- Fullstory
- Hotjar
- Clarity
- Mouseflow
- Acoustic
We can also integrate with other tools depending on what you require.
This means you can utilise a combination of testing and session replay tools to provide your visitors with the most personalised experience. You can learn more about your users, their pain points, and how you can make their website experience even better. Get in touch with us to see how our team can help optimise your site further.
