Glossary
Session replay
A reconstructed playback of one visitor's clicks, cursor movement and scrolling on a page, captured via browser events.
Session replay reconstructs an individual visitor's actions on a page — clicks, cursor movement, scrolling, and form interaction — for later playback. Despite the name, most tools do not record actual video; they capture DOM changes and input events in the browser via JavaScript and reconstruct the visual sequence afterward, which keeps the recording lightweight.
Session replay differs from a heatmap in scope: a heatmap aggregates many sessions into one pattern, while a replay shows one visitor's full path in detail, useful for understanding why a specific person got stuck rather than what most people tend to do. Because replays can capture whatever appears on screen, including text typed into form fields, most tools mask sensitive inputs like passwords and card numbers by default, and site owners are responsible for configuring masking on any other field that might expose personally identifiable information.
Session replay is primarily a qualitative research tool, used to debug confusing flows, reproduce a bug a support ticket describes, or understand a drop-off point that a funnel analysis flagged numerically but did not explain. The main pitfall is treating a handful of watched replays as representative: they are a small, usually non-random sample, and conclusions drawn from a few dramatic recordings should be checked against quantitative data before acting on them, given the consent obligations attached to recording identifiable user behavior under laws like General Data Protection Regulation in several jurisdictions.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026