Instead of relying only on numbers, session recordings show the actual user journey, helping you uncover behavior patterns and usability issues.

Why Use Session Recording

Session recordings go beyond traditional analytics by showing what users actually do, not just what they click.

You can use session recordings to:

• Identify usability issues and broken user flows
• Understand how visitors navigate across pages
• Detect friction points that cause drop-offs
  
• Analyze real user behavior before conversions or exits
  
• Validate design and UX decisions with actual user interactions

Dashboard Overview

When you open the Session Recording section under the Analyze module, you’ll see a list of all recording experiments created for your project.This view helps you monitor status, manage experiments, and access recordings quickly.

Metrics

1. Experiment Name :
   Displays the name of the session recording experiment along with creator details.
2. Status :
   
   Indicates whether the recording is:
   - Running – Actively recording sessions
   - Paused – Recording is stopped
   - Draft - Yet to launch

Recordings

Shows the total number of recorded visitor sessions in the experiment.

This helps you understand how much user data has been collected.

Filters and Views

1. All Modes :
   Displays all session recording experiments regardless of status.
2. Running :
   Shows experiments that are actively recording visitor sessions.
3. Paused :
   Shows experiments where recording is temporarily stopped.
4. Draft :
   Displays experiments that are created but not yet started.
5. Archived :
   Displays experiments that are no longer active but stored for reference.
   

Sorting Options

1. Recently Created :
   Sorts experiments based on when they were created.
   
2. Recently Modified :
   Sorts experiments based on the latest updates.
3. Experiment Name :
   Sorts experiments alphabetically based on the experiment name.
4. Recordings :
   Sorts experiments based on the total number of recordings collected in each experiment.

How to Setup your first Session Recording :

Step 1: Navigate to Session Recording

1. Go to the Analyze module
2. Click Session Recording
3. Click New Session Recording
   
4. You will be taken to the session recording setup screen.
   

Step 2: Name the Experiment

1. Enter a name for your session recording.
   

1. This helps you identify the experiment easily in the dashboard.
2. Example: Homepage Session Tracking
   

Step 3(a): Define Pages to Track

Define the web pages where visitor sessions should be recorded. You can include or exclude pages based on URL conditions.

1. Specify which web pages should be included or excluded in the recording.
   
2. You can configure this using URL match types.
   
3. While defining pages to track , you must specify how PageSense should identify the pages using URL matching conditions. 
   

Option	Description	Example
Simple URL Match	Tracks a specific page URL	https://www.example.com/
Exact URL Match	Tracks only when the URL exactly matches	https://www.example.com/products
URL Pattern Matches With	Tracks pages with similar structure	/products/*
URL Regex Matches With	Tracks dynamic URLs using regex	/product/[0-9]+
URL Contains	Tracks URLs containing specific text	contains /blog
URL Starts With	Tracks URLs starting with a value	https://www.example.com/products
URL Ends With	Tracks URLs ending with a value	/thankyou
URL Within Page Group	Tracks grouped pages	Product pages group

Step3(b): Pages to Not Track

1. Exclude specific pages where recordings should not be captured.
2. This is useful for avoiding irrelevant or sensitive pages such as internal tools or trial pages.
   

Step 4: Select Number of Recordings

Choose the number of visitor sessions you want to record for this experiment.

Available options include:

• 2,000 recordings
• 5,000 recordings
• 10,000 recordings
• All recordings

This helps you control the volume of recorded data.

Step 5: Proceed to Audience Settings

After completing the setup:

1. Review your configuration
2. Click Next

You will be taken to the Audience tab, where you can define which visitors should be included in the session recording.

For detailed instructions, refer to the Audience configuration document.

Step 6: Configure Privacy and Launch

After configuring the audience:

1. Click Next to move to the Privacy settings
2. Configure data masking and privacy options as required

Privacy settings help ensure sensitive user data is protected during session recording.

For detailed instructions, refer to the Privacy settings document.

Configure Data Masking

Data masking helps prevent sensitive visitor information from being displayed in session recordings.

Under Elements to Mask, you can specify the webpage elements that should be hidden during playback.

You can mask elements by:

• Entering CSS selectors manually (for example: #selector1, .selector2)
• Providing the webpage URL and selecting elements directly from the page preview
• Using the zps-mask custom attribute in your website code to automatically exclude specific elements from recordings

Once an element is masked, both the element content and the visitor interactions associated with it will not appear in the recording.

Advanced Privacy Options

PageSense also provides advanced privacy controls to automatically protect commonly sensitive data.

1. Mask all input fields
   Enable this option to automatically hide interactions within commonly used input elements such as text fields, buttons, dropdowns, labels, and text areas. This is useful when your website contains multiple form fields and you want broader privacy coverage without manually selecting each element.

1. Hide URL parameters
   Enable this option to prevent query parameter values from being displayed in recorded URLs. This helps protect sensitive information that may be passed through URL parameters during user sessions.

Finally, Review your setup and click launch the experiment.