Session recording glossary

An A/B test splits visitors at random between two versions of a page, email or offer, then compares how each group behaves. Because chance decides who sees which version, a clear difference points to the change itself.

A test turns a hunch from watching replays into evidence before you commit to a redesign. Change one thing at a time, and let the test run long enough to collect plenty of visits. For a worked example, see an analysis of two randomized studies on AI newsletters and presale replies.

The Activity list is the list of moments shown beside a replay, such as page views, searches and cart adds, in the order they happened. It works like a table of contents for the visit.

Scanning it first tells you whether a replay reaches the part you care about before you press play. In Session Recordings, clicking any moment jumps the replay straight to it, and a run of quick clicks merges into one row with a ×N count showing how many clicks it holds. The session replay page shows the whole player.

Add to cart is the moment a shopper puts a product in their cart, usually with a button on the product page. It is the clearest sign of buying intent before checkout, so stores often track it as a step of its own.

What shoppers do just before and after adding to cart shows whether the button is easy to find and whether the cart answers their questions. When someone adds an item and leaves, a reminder email can help, and this guide to abandoned cart subject lines covers how to word the first line they see.

Attribution is the set of rules a tool uses to decide which source, campaign or message gets credit for a visit or a sale. A shopper might click an ad, open an email and return through a search before buying, and each tool may credit a different step.

Knowing the rules behind each report explains why store, ad and email numbers rarely match. This explainer on how email revenue attribution works covers why store and email reports disagree.

A bounce is a visit that ends after one page, with no other page viewed. Analytics tools turn bounces into a bounce rate, and each tool defines and counts it in its own way.

A high bounce rate on a page is a reason to look closer, not a verdict. Some bounces are fine, like a visitor who finds your opening hours and leaves satisfied. Watching a few bounced visits to that page shows which kind you have.

Cart abandonment is when a shopper adds items to their cart and leaves without placing an order. Analytics often reports it as a rate: the share of carts that never become orders.

Some abandoned carts were only ever bookmarks, while others point to a problem you can fix, such as a surprise cost or a promo code that fails. Watching those visits shows which is which. To bring shoppers back afterward, stores often send cart recovery emails and texts that remind them what they left behind.

Checkout friction is anything that slows a shopper down or makes them hesitate between the cart and a finished order. Typical causes are costs that appear late, required accounts, long forms, confusing coupon boxes and unclear error messages.

It matters because a shopper at checkout has nearly decided to buy. Replays show what happens in the cart and around the moment checkout starts. Parts run by a payment provider can sit outside your own pages, so place a test order as well. The checkout friction checklist walks through each step.

A click map is a kind of heatmap that shows where visitors click or tap on a page, with the busiest spots in the warmest colors. It combines many visits to the same page into one picture.

It shows which links, buttons and photos draw attention and which get ignored. It cannot show the order of clicks or what a visitor did next, and a page needs steady traffic before the picture settles.

Consent is a visitor's permission for something you want to do, such as storing cookies or recording their visit for analytics. To be meaningful, it should be a free and informed choice, and as easy to withdraw as it was to give.

Many sites ask for consent to analytics through a cookie banner and only record visitors who agree. Rules differ by country and state, and this is general information, not legal advice. The guide to session recording privacy shows how consent fits with masking and privacy notices.

Conversion rate is the share of visits, or visitors, that complete a goal, such as placing an order or signing up. Tools differ on whether they divide by sessions or by people, so compare rates from the same tool.

A rate tells you how often something happens, not why. When it falls, find the page or step where people stop, then watch visits there. For stores, improving product pages with replays is a good place to start.

A cookie banner is the notice that tells visitors about cookies and similar technologies and lets them accept or decline, often by category, such as analytics or marketing. It is where many sites collect consent for analytics tools, including session recording.

A good banner makes declining as easy as accepting and lets visitors change their mind later. Test yours in a private browser window to confirm your tools wait for a choice. What a banner must include depends on where you and your visitors are, and this is general information, not legal advice.

A data deletion request is a person asking a business to erase the personal data it holds about them. Privacy laws in many places give people this right, with deadlines and exceptions that vary.

A written plan makes these requests quick to handle: confirm who is asking, find their visits, have them deleted and reply when it is done. The guide to recording retention covers deletion requests step by step. This is general information, not legal advice.

A dead click is a click or tap that produces no visible response. It often lands on a photo, heading or icon that looks clickable but is not, or on a real button that has stopped working.

Dead clicks show where a page promises something it does not deliver. Some analytics tools flag them automatically. In a replay you see the click itself and what followed, which tells you whether to make the element work, make it look less clickable or write up a bug report.

The DOM, short for Document Object Model, is the browser's live structure of a web page: every heading, image, button and block of text, arranged as a tree. Scripts change the DOM whenever a menu opens, a cart updates or a pop-up appears.

Most session recording tools capture the DOM instead of filming the screen. That is why a replay can rebuild your page sharply and show each change the visitor saw, with no audio or camera involved.

A DOM snapshot is a saved copy of a page's structure at one moment, usually taken when a recording starts or a new page loads. Every change after it is stored as a separate event.

During playback, the player rebuilds the page from the snapshot and applies the changes in order, so the replay looks like your real page rather than a video. It also means nothing outside the page, such as other tabs or apps, can appear in a replay. The guide to what session recording is explains the process in plain terms.

A drop-off is the point where visitors leave a path you hoped they would follow, such as the step between cart and checkout. In a funnel report, it is the gap between one step and the next.

Analytics shows where the biggest drop-off is, and replays of visits that stopped there show what visitors were doing when they left. For carts, the guide to why customers abandon carts lists the patterns replays reveal.

An event is a single recorded action or change, such as a page view, a click, a tap, a scroll or a form submission. Analytics tools count events, and session recordings store them in order so a player can act them out.

Events are the building blocks of most reports. Knowing which events a tool records tells you which questions it can answer, for example whether it sees scrolling or only page views.

Form abandonment is when a visitor starts filling in a form, such as a contact, quote or sign-up form, and leaves without sending it.

Submission counts include only finished forms, so abandonment stays hidden in most reports. A replay shows the last field a visitor touched, with typing masked as asterisks. Check first that messages really arrive, since a form that fails to deliver looks the same from your side. Our guide to why visitors don't finish your contact form walks through the common causes.

A funnel is the series of steps you expect visitors to take toward a goal, such as product page, cart, checkout and order. A funnel report shows how many visitors reach each step, and the shrinking numbers give it its name.

It points to the step that loses the most people, which is usually the best place to look first. A funnel counts and does not show behavior, so pair it with replays of visits that stopped at the weakest step.

A heatmap is a picture of one page that combines the clicks, taps, mouse movement or scrolling of many visits, with warm colors for busy areas and cool colors for quiet ones. Click maps and scroll maps are the most common kinds.

Heatmaps are good for spotting where attention goes on a page. They show no sequence, so they cannot tell you what a visitor did before or after a click. This comparison of recordings, heatmaps and analytics shows when each one helps.

Idle time is a stretch of a visit with no clicks, scrolling or typing, often because the visitor is reading, switched tabs or stepped away. It counts toward the length of a visit even though nothing happens on screen.

Watching it wastes your time, so many replay players can skip it. Session Recordings skips quiet stretches automatically, and skipping is on by default. Turn it off when your question is about waiting, such as a page you suspect loads slowly.

A landing page is the first page a visitor sees on your site, whether that is the home page, a product page or a blog post. Analytics tools often call it the entry page. In marketing, the term also means a page built for one campaign.

First impressions form here, so it often decides whether visitors stay. Check which pages people land on most, especially from ads, emails and search results, and make sure each one quickly answers what those visitors came for.

Live view lets you watch a visit while it is still happening, rather than after it ends. Tools that offer it mark visits in progress and play them a short delay behind real time.

It helps when you launch a new page or sale, or want to see a fix work for a real visitor. In Session Recordings, visits in progress show as LIVE in your list, and you can follow one a few seconds behind. Read more about watching visitors live.

Masking hides what visitors type, or other sensitive parts of a page, so a recording shows that something was entered without showing what it was. Where it happens matters: masking in the visitor's browser means the real text never leaves their device.

Session Recordings masks typing in the visitor's browser before anything is sent, so typed text shows as asterisks. You can still see where someone typed, paused or retyped. Words submitted in a store's search box are the exception and can be shown. Details are on the private recording page.

Personal data is information that relates to an identifiable person, such as a name, email address, phone number, order history or an online identifier. Many privacy laws define it broadly, so data that looks anonymous can still count if it can be linked back to someone.

Recordings can contain it, for example a name shown on an account page or words typed into a search box. Collect only what you need and tell visitors what you collect, for instance with this privacy notice template for session recording. This is general information, not legal advice.

Playback speed is how fast a replay plays compared with the real visit. Replay players usually offer a few settings, such as half speed, normal speed, double speed and four times speed.

Speed lets you skim the parts that do not matter and slow down for the parts that do. Use a fast setting for ordinary browsing, and normal or half speed around the moment you care about. A routine for watching recordings faster gives each speed a job.

A rage click is a burst of rapid clicks or taps on the same spot, usually because the visitor expected something to happen and it did not. It is one of the clearest signs of frustration on a page.

Some analytics tools detect rage clicks automatically. In a replay you can see the burst itself and what the visitor was trying to reach, often a slow button, a broken link or something that only looks clickable. This checklist for your first replays lists it among the signs to watch for.

A retention period is how long data is kept before it is deleted. For session recordings, a shorter period lowers risk, while a longer one lets you compare seasons or revisit old problems.

Choose a period that matches how you use replays, and state it in your privacy notice. Session Recordings keeps replays for 30 days on Free, 90 days on Plus and 12 months on Pro, and starring a replay keeps it for good, as the pricing page shows. What the law expects varies by place, and this is general information, not legal advice.

Scroll depth is how far down a page a visitor scrolls, often shown as a percentage of the page's length. A scroll map shows it for many visits at once, fading where fewer people reach.

It tells you whether visitors ever see what sits lower on a page, such as reviews, delivery details or a sign-up form. If something important sits below where most visitors stop, move it up or give them a reason to keep going.

A session is one visit to a website, from arrival until the visitor leaves or stays inactive for long enough. Many analytics tools end a session after 30 minutes without activity, so one person can have several sessions in a day.

Sessions are the basic unit of most traffic reports, and a session recording usually covers one session. Knowing how each of your tools defines a session helps when their numbers do not match.

Session recording is the practice of capturing real visits to a website so they can be played back later. Most tools note the page's structure and each event, such as page views, clicks, taps and scrolling, rather than filming the screen.

It shows how real people use your site, including where they hesitate and what breaks, which totals in a report cannot show. If you run a Shopify store, this guide to session recordings for Shopify stores covers which visits to check first.

Session replay is the playback side of session recording: watching a recorded visit rebuilt as it happened, with the pages, clicks, taps and scrolling in order. The two terms are often used for the same thing.

A replay gives context a number cannot, like the moment a visitor gave up or the button they kept tapping. To see one before you record your own site, try a free interactive replay demo.

Site search is the search box on your own website, where visitors type what they want in their own words. The searches people run are one of the most direct records of what they came for.

They show which products, sizes and questions matter to visitors, and the words visitors use for them. What a visitor does after searching shows whether the results helped. In a replay that shows search words, you can read what a shopper looked for and watch what they did next, as the page on recording store visits shows.

A tap target is anything on a touch screen that a visitor taps, such as a button, link, menu icon or size option. Targets that are too small or too close together cause missed taps and wrong choices.

Phone shoppers feel this most on menus, variant pickers and close buttons. In replays of phone visits, repeated taps on one spot, or taps that land on the wrong item, point to targets worth enlarging or spacing out. More in mobile shopping problems you only see in replays.

A timeline is the bar beneath a replay that represents the whole visit from start to finish. You can usually click or drag along it to jump to any point.

Marked moments on a timeline let you find what matters without watching everything. In Session Recordings, the timeline marks page views, searches along with the words used, add to cart and checkout, so you can see at a glance whether a visit reached the cart.

A traffic source is where a visit came from, such as a search engine, a social network, an email, an ad or another website that links to you. Visits without a detectable source are usually grouped as direct.

Sources show which channels bring visitors who stay and buy, not just visitors. Visits from emails and apps often arrive without a clear source, so tag your campaign links with UTM parameters to tell them apart.

A usability test is a session where you ask a few people to do real tasks on your site, such as finding a product or a delivery price, and watch where they struggle.

You learn the most by staying quiet and asking people to think aloud. Small rounds of about five similar people find most of the common problems, and replays of real visits then show how often those problems happen. Our guide to finding usability problems on a small website walks through a test.

UTM parameters are tags added to the end of a link, such as utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, that tell analytics tools where a visit came from. The visitor lands on the same page, and the tags are recorded with the visit.

They let you see which email, post or ad sent each visitor, which plain links often cannot. Keep the wording consistent across campaigns, for example by building every link with a UTM builder.

The viewport is the part of a web page visible on a visitor's screen at one time. It changes with the device, the size of the browser window and whether a phone is held upright or sideways.

Designing for the viewport means the most important content and buttons are visible without hunting, on a phone as well as a computer. Replaying phone visits at the phone's own size shows what fit on screen and what did not.

A win-back is a message or offer sent to a past customer who has stopped buying, to bring them back. It usually goes out after a quiet stretch that matches how often that kind of customer tends to buy.

A past customer already knows your store, so a timely, relevant reminder can be enough. For Shopify stores, myuser.ai explains customer win-back emails and texts, including timing around buying cycles.

A zero-result search is a search on your site that returns nothing. Either you do not carry what the visitor wants, or you do and the search cannot find it under the words they used.

Each one is a visitor saying exactly what they wanted and leaving without it. Add common spellings and visitors' own words to product names or descriptions, and make sure help pages can be found. The guide to what site searches tell you shows how to keep a search log.