Using Session Recordings Dashboard in VWO

Session Recordings dashboard is the central place where you can view session recordings, manage data collection settings and create and manage views. VWO’s Session Recordings allows you to record visitor interactions with your website. To access the Session Recordings dashboard, go to  Insights > Session Recordings.

Using the session recordings dashboard, you can typically do the following:

• Enable data collection
• Configure data collection
• Create views
• View recordings
• Manage recordings
• Filter recordings

Enable Data Collection for Recordings

The data tracking starts once you have enabled the option Start Data Collection from the Configuration settings.
Also, if you are using the Session Recordings for the first time, you must first enable the VWO Session Recordings to collect data for your website. Once you enable it, click START to start collecting data for your website. Post this, VWO starts the recording on all the pages that have VWO Smartcode.

Procedure

1. Go to Insights > Session Recordings.
2. To enable the Session Recordings feature, click ENABLE NOW. 
   
   NOTE: This option only appears if you are using the recordings view for the first time.
3. Create a new session recording view using the Views tab on the right. Once done, click the START button to start recording. To learn about creating a Session Recordings View, refer to Create Session Recording View.
   
   NOTE: If you have already started the recording, the START button will change to RUNNING. 

Configure data collection

By default, VWO collects data on all the pages where you have installed the Smartcode. But if you want to exclude certain URLs, add anonymizations, show canvas elements in the recordings, or pause the data collection, then you can do it using the Configuration section of the session recordings.

To configure the settings:

1. Go to Insights > Session Recordings.
2. Click the gear icon. The Configuration section appears.
   
3. To hide specific areas on your web pages, you can use the following options:
   • Hide all text on HTML body
     Check this box if you want to anonymize all text elements on the entire HTML body of a website.
     
     
   • Anonymize/Whitelist Elements
     Add specific elements you want to anonymize or whitelist. For more information, see How to secure your visitors data in VWO Session Recordings.
     
     By default, VWO Anonymize all key presses ignoring all input fields, and does not store or transmit data. To know more about anonymizing specific fields or inputs, click here.
     
     NOTE: Anonymize all key presses option is enabled by default and you cannot disable it. To know more about this, please contact VWO Support. 
   • URLs
     Use this option to specify URLs where session recordings should not be captured. For more information, see Excluding URLs.
     
     
   • Show Canvas elements in recordings
     Check this box to capture canvas elements in session recordings. For more information, see Capture Canvas Elements in Session Recordings.
     
4. To stop the recording, click Pause Data Collection.
   Post this, VWO will stop collecting recordings.
5. If you want to clear all existing data from the recordings, click the Flush all data option.
6. Click the email icon to share the report.
7. Once done with configuring the session recordings, click Save. 

Create Views

Session Recordings in VWO generate a visual report of the visitor journey on a webpage. This helps you in identifying the sections of your website which receive maximum visitor attention. Using VWO Session Recordings, you can create customized views to track activities of a specific visitor segment and save the view for quick viewing. To learn more about Views and how to create a session recording view, refer to Creating a Session Recordings View.

View Recordings

You can view a recording by clicking on the Play button corresponding to the recording you want to view.

Procedure

1. Go to Insights > Session Recordings.
2. In the Session Recordings dashboard, select the view from the VIEWS panel for which you want to view the recording. 
   All the recordings corresponding to the selected view appear in the dashboard.
3. Click Play/Viewed to view the recording. 
   
   NOTE: The Play button changes to Viewed for the recordings you have already viewed.
4. You can view the recordings along with location information, duration, the device used to access, and the date of recording. To know more about interpreting session recordings in VWO, refer to Interpreting Session Recordings.

Manage Recordings

• You can delete and save or download Visitor Recordings per your VWO plan. To do this, click the vertical ellipses icon (⋮) corresponding to the one you want to perform an action on.
  
  
• To save the recording, click Save. On successful save of the recording, it appears in the Saved Recordings section of the dashboard.
  
  NOTE: If you annotate a recording with observations, it gets saved automatically.
  
• To download the recording, click Download. 
  
  NOTE: The recording gets downloaded as a zip file. To view the recording, unzip the file and then open the index.html file.
• To share the recording, click the Share link. Using this option, you can share the direct link to your recording over email.
  
  
• To delete a recording, click Delete. 
  
  NOTE: Once deleted, the recording will no more be visible in the dashboard. Also, the delete operation cannot be undone.

Filter Recordings

Different filters are available to filter your recordings in the Session Recordings dashboard. Using these filters, you can search for the session recordings that you have created in the past. To learn more about using filters, refer to How to Filter Session Recordings in VWO?