Unleashing the Power of Session Recordings: Turning Data Questions into "Aha" Moments

Session recordings can help teams uncover trends and patterns that may not have been noticed before. By viewing the actions of high-value customers, teams can gain valuable insight into what they're looking for and cater to their needs.
July 13, 2023
by
Lucky Orange
How to convert data questions into "aha" moments using Session Recordings

Anyone who regularly views reporting understands the empty feeling of noticing a trend but not being able to pinpoint why it's happening.

Modern tools have made it easier to spot these trends and even prioritize which data sets we should be analyzing. But, even then, data dead ends can leave teams scratching their head wishing they could have another layer of insight.

And on a website, these head-scratchers often have a direct correlation with revenue:

  • The new campaign that's underperforming compared to similar prior efforts
  • Mobile visitors bouncing at a much higher rate than those on desktop or tablet
  • Higher-than-average cart abandonment with visitors from certain areas of the world

But website data questions don't have to lead to an under informed A/B test or (maybe worse) saying, "oh well it is what it is." They can and should lead to 'aha' moments. All it takes is an understanding of session recordings and basic conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy.

Here's how it works.

Common Website Data Challenges

No matter where you exist within the ecommerce industry, you're likely to have similar data challenges: low conversion rates, high cart abandonment, or poor performance from certain demographics. 

Analyzing quantitative data can be a difficult task. Even when there are trends, it can be hard to determine what is actually causing the pattern. This leaves teams scratching their heads, wondering why certain things are happening and how they can improve the situation.

Without understanding the underlying cause of a problem, it's impossible to develop an effective solution or make informed decisions about next steps. This leads to frustration as teams struggle to find meaningful insights from raw data points without any context or explanation for what’s going on behind the scenes.

This isn't to say you can't manage a business successfully solely using quantitative reporting. 

There are, after all, a finite number of variables that can impact a business situation. But what happens when a website (ripe for confounding variables) is involved?

With websites, we run into a variety of unique potential issues that make analysis more difficult:

  • Unexpected technical issues
  • Different devices and browsers making changes on their end
  • Team members not communicating changes they've made
  • 3rd-party plugins updating and causing issues

As a result, website data challenges commonly appear as a team member not having an answer for:

  • "This audience segment historically performs really well, but this quarter is way down."
  • "Did we make a change to the site? We aren't seeing nearly the number of Clearance items purchased we usually do."
  • "We're seeing a way higher conversion rate from European visitors than normal, how can we maximize that?"

These questions are more than just curiosities to mull over in a meeting—they're opportunities for game-changing growth. But that opportunity only exists if you can dig further into the situation, with the hope that you see what's causing the trend.

The right toolkit for this job exists and it lives within the world of conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Introducing Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization is the process of optimizing a website or application to maximize the number of visitors that take a desired action. This action could be making a purchase in a store, signing up for a newsletter, or completing some other goal that moves them closer to becoming a paying customer.

CRO tools provide a visual (qualitative) counterpart to other data sources. And there's no truer representation of what a visitor does on your website than a session recording.

Session Recordings: Your Key to "Aha" Moments

Session recordings are a complete playback of what a visitor did while on your website. Lucky Orange Session Recordings include every page they visited, element clicked, form completed, rage click occurrence and more.

Session recordings example

Session recordings can help teams identify when visitors encounter an issue like a broken link, slow loading page or confusing navigation. They can also reveal when visitors are abandoning their cart due to unexpected shipping costs or payment processing errors.

For example, if you notice that users are consistently abandoning their shopping carts, a session recording might reveal that a glitch in the checkout process is causing frustration. Or perhaps users are having difficulty finding a particular product due to an unclear navigation menu. 

With session recordings, these once puzzling data questions become clear, leading to impactful "aha" moments that can significantly improve your website's performance.

Segmentation makes analysis easier

But if you're lucky enough to have thousands of website visitors a day, there's no chance you're watching a recording of every session.

This is where the power of segmentation comes into play. Inside a tool like Lucky Orange you're able to filter sessions (we just call them Visitors) by anything you'd like including:

  • UTM parameter
  • Custom events like add-to-cart, clicking a specific element, etc.
  • Demographic data
  • On-site behaviors like specific pages viewed or session duration

Choosing the right segments to analyze

Growing businesses usually get website traffic from a variety of sources. And their converting customers reflect different efforts like paid media, on-site sales, affiliate marketing and more. 

So, given that you don’t have unlimited time to commit to website optimization, which segments matter most? 

There are two paths when it comes to audience segmentation for CRO:

Reactive optimization is where you’re responding to a common customer concern, message from your tech team or to a data trend you’ve noticed with a specific group. 

This is a much simpler path to segmentation as you usually have some sort of input for segmentation as a starting point. You’re looking at a group who saw a certain page, came with a specific UTM parameter or performed a specific on-site behavior.

Proactive optimization is where you’re heading into the site looking for optimization opportunities. This means you can look at anyone doing anything and hope to find something worth investigating further. 

Inside Lucky Orange, we provide Optimizable Segments for your proactive optimization efforts. These autogenerated segments are groups of people we think all site owners should monitor as they have a great potential impact on your ability to drive revenue. 

Optimizable Segments including filters like Frustrated Visitors or Confused Visitors give you a great starting point for watching session recordings or studying form analytics.

Conclusion

The power of session recordings can help teams uncover trends and patterns that may not have been noticed before. 

By viewing the actions of high-value customers, teams can gain valuable insight into what they're looking for and find new ways to cater to their needs. Not only do session recordings provide a complete playback of visitor interactions with your website, but they also allow you to filter by various criteria such as UTM parameters, demographic data or on-site behaviors like specific pages viewed or session duration. 

This makes it easier than ever to identify issues and opportunities for improvement so that you can make better decisions about your quantitative data analysis. With the right tools in hand, understanding user behavior doesn't need to be a daunting task—it's an opportunity for game-changing growth.

Turn your data dilemmas into “aha” moments today with Lucky Orange. Start your 7-day free trial here.

Checkout our roundup to learn:
  • What to pledge
  • How to improve
  • Which tools will set you up for success

Dale Wilson

Partnerships Manager,
adQuadrant
Resolution

I think the most important thing brands can do in 2023 is to better manage their customer data—both ethically and effectively. There’s an opportunity for brands to know their customers better than ever before—a clear benefit for both the customer and the brand. When you manage your data correctly, you’ll create stronger and more personalized ads, creative, site experiences, and so much more.

Tip

This is a classic: Let the data guide you. Go where the buyers for your products are and communicate with them on a personal level (i.e. by persona and funnel position) and nurture those relationships (past, present, and future customers). It’s possible—all through data.

Tool

It's an honest tie between Gorgias and Klaviyo. Both tools have amazing plans for 2023 and beyond, and I'm looking forward to seeing the impact both have on their clients this year.

Shawn Khemsurov

Co-founder,
Electric Eye
Resolution

We recommend that Shopify brands analyze and update their websites using data-driven decisions. Using analytics tools such as heatmaps and scrollmaps can help brands better understand how customers are interacting with their store.

Tip

Store owners tend to make assumptions about the way customers interact with their website. Most never go back and analyze their design choices to find pain points or areas of opportunity. By using heatmaps and scrollmaps, they can see where real customers are clicking and concentrating their attention. Leveraging this data, brands can start to iterate on design and make their online store experience streamlined and intuitive.

Tool

Hotjar provides a simple way to implement heatmaps, scrollmaps, and recorded user sessions on your site, helping you acquire incredibly informative user data. Additionally, it gives you the ability to create on-site surveys, which allows you to obtain direct and often critical feedback from users about their experience.

Katelyn Glass

Founder and CEO,
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Resolution

Test various attribution models and analyze the impact on your business. At Fifty Six, we are always here to help our clients identify and optimize their approach—a critical step in any successful marketing strategy.

Tip

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times–Customer Lifetime Value. And even more importantly, Future Lifetime Value (FLTV). With the ever-growing importance of first-party data, it is crucial that brands take a good look at their CRM and FLTV metrics.

Tool

OrderlyEmails is our go-to tool for transactional emails. It helps us level up our brands’ email aesthetics with customizable, quick-to-implement Shopify templates.

Lately, I’ve been really interested in Smile.io’s loyalty platform. Their UX is fantastic for teams with low bandwidth!

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Founder,
WIRO
Resolution

Stop allocating budgets to low-hanging fruit that doesn’t move the needle on conversion. Think about what’s really going to improve your CX and the return of undertaking different initiatives—not just on what’s top on your list of bugbears on the site!

Tip

One of the best ways to understand your customer behavior is by using HotJar. Their heat-mapping and screen recording tools shine a light on where customers are navigating to and from on your site, where they're rage clicking and experiencing frustration, and where conversion is dropping off within real life customer journeys and flows!

Understanding your customers’ pain points via data and analytics , will allow you to work with your CRO/CX Agency to solve customer frustrations and improve conversion.

Tool

Rewind backs up all product, customer, and order data for Shopify sites—essential since Shopify itself doesn’t provide this solution. It's saved so many of our clients time and money from administrative accidents.

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Jimmy Aristizabal

Partnership Manager,
TalentPop
Resolution

33% of customer service inquiries are pre-sale questions. What does this mean? If you’re not investing in customer service, you’re missing out on revenue-generating opportunities.

Tip

The benefits of elevating your customer experience:

  • 10% to 25% increase in AOV for customers who engage with live chat pre-purchase
  • 21x higher conversion rate for customers who reach out via Live Chat or SMS compared to other site visitors
  • 87% of customers who have a great customer experience will make another purchase
  • 72% of customers share positive experiences with 6 or more individuals
Tool

Gorgias is our favorite Helpdesk platform. They can reduce costs by 35%, primarily by decreasing the average ticket handle time. Their machine learning algorithms are trained on millions of ecommerce-related interactions across Gorgias’ customer base and provide accurate, automated replies for the most common ecommerce inquiries. This helps our agents resolve tickets faster, which provides the customer a seamless experience.

Jessica Grossman

Founder and CEO,
In Social
Resolution

Trust your agency! Agencies do the same things across multiple brands and niches, so we see the trends and have the practice and experience!

Tip

Don't be afraid of data and insights. If customers aren't clicking on your emails, try a new CTA. If your ads are driving good metrics at a small spend, start scaling. If your customers are complaining about a product, look into QA! If the data tells you something isn't working, let it go and try something else!

Tool

I'm supposed to say Tydo, right? 😉

Rikin Diwan

Chief Growth Officer,
soona
Resolution

Double down on differentiation. There will be a lot of headwinds this year and standing out from the crowd will set you apart.

Tip

A picture is worth 1,000 words. A video? Probably millions. In ecommerce that value translates into engagement, acquisition, and retention—everything you need to impact your bottom line.

At soona, we've seen the we've seen the impact of creative and the continuous split testing of it yield results. Our resolution is to challenge ourselves and double down on innovation and creative optionality so that each brand we work with can distinguish themselves in a crowded sea of D2C ecomm. We'd love to see our brands share this resolution and keep pushing the creative limits.

Tool

Klaviyo. We're using it to power our email and newsletter at soona too!

Shayna Silvers

Director of Marketing Strategy,
Absolute Web
Resolution

Optimize your returns strategy! This can lead to valuable customer insights, enhanced user experiences, and increased revenue and customer loyalty.

Tip

Brands need to dive deeper into understanding their customers to set themselves up for success. Conduct research to gain insights into customer needs, preferences, and behaviors. By doing so, you can develop targeted strategies that will enhance customer experience and boost overall retention.

Tool

Right now I would say Gorgias. Having a good customer service tool is crucial to building strong customer relationships.

Wes Buckwalter

Resolution

Start paying heavy attention to data, specifically around retention. We see a lot of effort put towards acquisition with the assumption that once someone buys, they are your customer forever. Instead, get to know your customer, understand their needs, and analyze their behaviors once they are on-site and judge their sentiment after they have visited. Work with a retention focused and data-driven agency to implement tools that contribute to repeat business and customer delight. It will pay dividends.

Tip

When surveyed, about 80% of ecommerce merchants think that they are delivering a great experience to their customers. However, when the same customers are surveyed, only 8% of those customers think that they are getting a great experience from the merchant. Now, more than ever, retaining loyal customers is an essential part of any online business and you should spend time with your customers to judge their experience with your website and products and offer improvements based on that feedback.

Tool

Tydo's report cards are an essential tool, along with Klaviyo for email and SMS, Recharge for subscriptions and memberships, Okendo for reviews and surveys, Rebuy for AI driven collections and upsells, Loop for self service returns... each tool is great on their own, but their strength as the ultimate tool comes from when they are used together!

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Report Cards

Free

Report Cards is a customized glimpse into your business, delivered to your inbox for free.

Report Cards consolidates all your key metrics across platforms for an at-a-glance pulse of your business.

Discover metrics for every team member so they can stay updated with the right data on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

It's free because we believe everyone should have access to the basics.

Learn more
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Portfolio

Portfolio is a hub for analytics across multiple Shopify stores. The perfect tool for agencies.

See an aggregate view of all your data for all your stores in one place.

Make real time assessments on marketing initiatives across every storefront you manage.

Analyze the performance of one store versus another in seconds.

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