Watch session recordings

Watching every visit takes far too long. The trick is to filter first: visits with rage clicks, visits that ended without an order, or visits that clicked a specific button on the heatmap. Five well-chosen recordings usually tell you more than fifty random ones.

Find the right visits

At the top of Research → Recordings:

• All recordings or Favorites: all recordings, or only your team's favorites.
• Period: 24 hours, 7 days, 14 days or 30 days. 7 days is selected first. 24 hours means the last 24 hours, not the calendar day.
• Device: All devices, Desktop, Mobile or Tablet.

Below that, drop-downs narrow the list further:

• Any page: only visits that viewed a certain page. Similar pages, such as all product pages, count as one.
• All sources: only visits from one traffic source, such as Paid ads or Email.
• New and returning: only New visitors or Returning visitors.
• All countries: only visits from one country.
• With and without order: only visits that Placed an order, or that placed No order. This needs your orders connected.
• Any length: skip short visits, for example Over 30 seconds.
• With or without frustration: only visits With rage clicks, With dead clicks or With JavaScript errors.
• Sort: Newest first, Longest first, Most frustrated first or Most pages first.

What the list shows

Each row shows the length of the visit, the number of pages and clicks, and badges for rage clicks, dead clicks, errors and orders. You also see the first and last page, when the visit started, the device, country, traffic source and whether the visitor was new or returning.

Sometimes a row says Unknown source. Varly has the recording, but no page data for that visit, so it doesn't know where the visitor came from or whether they were new. These recordings only show when you don't filter by traffic source or by new and returning visitors.

Recordings you have already opened get a gray play button and the label ✓ Watched. This is per person, so each team member keeps track of their own.

Replay a visit

Click a row to open the player.

• Use the round play button to play and pause, jump back with −10 s or forward with +30 s, or drag along the timeline.
• Skip idle moments (on by default) jumps over stretches of more than 5 seconds without any mouse movement, scrolling, typing, clicks or page changes. A short message shows how much was skipped.
• Change the speed from 0.5× to 8×.
• Keyboard: the space bar plays or pauses; the arrow keys jump 5 seconds, or 30 seconds with Shift.

Colored marks on the timeline show page changes, rage clicks, dead clicks, errors, orders and notes. The What happened list next to the player shows every event in order. Click one to jump to just before that moment. Choose Problems to see only rage clicks, dead clicks and errors, or All events to see everything.

Use ← Previous recording and Next recording → at the top to move through the same filtered list without going back.

Text may show as dots: that is the setting Hide text in recordings, which protects your visitors. Page addresses in a recording never include the part after ? or #. See Privacy in session recordings.

Notes and sharing

1. Pause at a moment worth discussing.
2. Type your note in the field under Notes, for example "Can't find the size chart".
3. Click Add note.

The note is linked to that moment. It appears on the timeline and in the list for the whole team, with your name. Click Delete to remove a note.

To point a colleague to a moment, click Copy link at …. The link opens the recording at that time. Only people with access to this site can open it.

Favorites

Click Add to favorites (★) to add a recording to your team's favorites. It then shows Favorite and appears under the Favorites tab for everyone on the team.

Recordings are normally deleted after 30 days. Favorites are kept for 13 months, so add the visits you want to show in a report or discuss later to your favorites. Adding a note adds the recording to your favorites too. Remove it from your favorites and it goes back to the normal 30 days: a recording that is already older than 30 days is then removed.

AI summary

Click Summarize with AI above the notes. The AI reads what happened in the visit and gives you:

• a frustration level, from No frustration to Frustrated;
• a short summary of what the visitor tried to do and where it went wrong;
• the key moments, which you can click to jump to them;
• a Next step: what to look into or test.

The summary is saved with the recording, so your team sees it too. Summarize again replaces it. This needs an AI key for your organization; see Add your AI key.

Delete a recording

Owners can delete a recording for good, for example when a visitor asks for it: open the recording, click Delete recording and confirm. This cannot be undone. See Delete data for exactly what is removed.

Who can do what

Viewers can watch recordings. Owners and editors can also add notes, add favorites and create AI summaries. Only owners can delete recordings. See Team roles.