session recording and heatmaps
Session recording plays back an anonymized replay of exactly how one visitor moved through your site, while a heatmap combines many visits into a single picture of where people click and scroll.
Session recording captures how one real visitor used your site: where the mouse moved, what they scrolled past, what they clicked, where they paused. Play it back and you watch the visit happen again, silently, like a screen recording someone made without knowing it. A heatmap does something similar but flattens many of these visits into one picture, usually a page with warm colours showing where clicks and attention pile up and cool colours showing where nobody bothers to look.
Both tools exist to answer a question that raw numbers cannot: not just where people dropped off, which a funnel already tells you, but why. A funnel might show that most visitors leave a page without scrolling far enough to see the phone number. A heatmap can show you that the phone number sits below a section nobody scrolls to. A recording can show you someone hovering over a button that looks clickable but is not.
These tools work on top of the same sessions that ordinary analytics count, they just capture more detail about what happened inside each one.
Why it matters to you
Numbers tell you that something is wrong. Recordings and heatmaps often tell you what is wrong, without any guessing. That is a big difference when you are deciding what to fix on a page and do not want to redesign the whole thing on a hunch.
It also catches problems that never show up as a clean statistic. A form field that looks fine on a laptop but overlaps the submit button on a particular phone model will quietly cost you leads for months without ever tripping an alarm in your analytics. A handful of session recordings on mobile will show you that in minutes.
How I use it
I turn on session recording and heatmaps through PostHog on the sites where it is set up, with anonymization on and no recording of anything typed into sensitive fields. I do not run it on every page forever. I turn it on around a specific page or step when the funnel or the reporting shows a problem I cannot explain from the numbers alone.
Once I have an answer, I usually turn recording off again for that page rather than leaving it running indefinitely. It is a diagnostic tool for me, not a permanent surveillance layer on your site.
What it looks like in practice
If a client asks why a page with decent traffic is not converting, this is often where I look before I touch the design. A dozen recordings of that page usually make the problem obvious: people rage-clicking something that is not a button, scrolling straight past the call to action, or abandoning a form at a specific field.
The fix that comes out of it is usually small and specific, moving a button, shortening a form, fixing an overlap on mobile, rather than a full page rebuild. That is the value of watching real behaviour instead of guessing from a chart.
Questions I get about this
- Can I see who a specific visitor was in a session recording?
- No, and I would not set it up that way even if a tool offered it. The recordings I use are anonymized, showing mouse movement, scrolling and clicks without names, emails or anything that identifies the person.
- Is a heatmap the same as a session recording?
- They come from the same underlying data but answer different questions. A recording shows you one visit in full detail. A heatmap blends hundreds or thousands of visits into a single image, so you can see patterns a single recording would never show you.
- Do I need to watch every recording myself?
- No. I use them to answer a specific question, usually "why did people drop off at this step," and I watch a handful of relevant ones rather than all of them. Watching recordings for their own sake takes a lot of time for very little extra insight past the first few.
Want this set up properly for your business?
This is the kind of thing I build every week. Grab a time and we will talk through what fits.