How to use Session Recordings to Grow Your SaaS

Looking for SaaS optimization solutions that actually bring results?

Session recording tools bring a lot to the table. They provide an excellent opportunity to:

• Add more context to the user journey – Session replays allow you to watch how visitors interacted with the landing page and what caused them to move forward in the sales funnel. You can also use session recordings to find potential onboarding issues.
• See how the users interact with your web application – You can track every scroll, every mouse movement, and every click, just like you’re sitting next to each other.
• Find bugs and usability issues – Many of these are detected automatically. We’re going to describe that below in more detail!

We know that session replays may seem overwhelming at first. You’ve got plenty of qualitative data to process. If you were to watch all the recordings, one after the other, you’d probably need some extra hours in the day.

Luckily, analyzing session recordings can be more effective than that!

In this article, we’re going to show you how to use session recordings to grow your SaaS business. We’ll go through some of the tools, tips, and tricks you’re sure to find useful. Last but not least, we’re also featuring a real-life SaaS success story!

Ready to get the most out of your SaaS with the help of session replays? Let’s dive in!

• Find bugs quicker
  • Qualitative insights
  • Automatic detection – rage clicks and error clicks
• Use filters and custom segments
  • Filters
  • Custom segments for SaaS analytics
• Integrate with other SaaS tools
• SaaS and session recordings success story: RocketLink

Find bugs quicker

We’ve already mentioned this advantage in the introduction. There’s a couple of different ways session replays can help you find bugs on your website and in your SaaS product:

Qualitative insights

As soon as you start watching session recordings, you’ll soon realize they’re a goldmine of information. Even when we watch recordings of our website, we’re often surprised by user behavior we couldn’t predict.

Session replays can help you find the mismatch between your mental models and the mental models of your users. You and the users might have very different ideas about how things work. For example, we often find out that visitors consider some features to be clickable while they’re not.

Automatic detection – rage clicks and error clicks

Aside from observations only, LiveSession detects two types of potential issues automatically. They’re called rage clicks and error clicks:

• Rage clicks are registered when the user clicks on something repeatedly and very fast. This is an indicator that they got frustrated with a feature that’s not working properly.
• Error clicks, on the other hand, apply to technical issues, specifically JavaScript errors. The user might not realize that something is wrong in the app, yet this kind of error suggests that there’s probably something to look into.

Thanks to dedicated filters, these errors are really easy to browse. See how it works:

Use session recording filters and custom segments

You can apply a wide variety of session recording filters to narrow down your search results and find the most interesting session recordings faster.

Different combinations of filters can be saved as custom segments to analyze later. You can also share these segments with your teammates and discuss your findings with them.

Filters

LiveSession offers an extensive choice of session recording filters. You can filter recordings based on location, duration, system properties, and much, much more! If you’d like to dig deeper, we recommend our article about user segmentation.

In this post, we’re going to focus on the ones that can be particularly useful for SaaS businesses:

• Pages count – You can choose to see recordings where the users have visited more than just one page. This will give you more insights into the user journey.
• First session – It’s a great way to analyze the behavior of users who are visiting your website for the first time.
• Start URL, Exit URL, Visited URL – This group of filters will help you analyze sessions where users have interacted with a specific page and see how it affected their experience.
• Referrer, UTM tag – With these filters, you can get in-depth insights on the results of your campaigns. Use them to see how the interactions vary depending on where the users came from, e.g. social media shares or paid campaigns.
• Device, mobile type, browser, OS, screen size – These filters will help you analyze how the experience varies depending on the technical variables. Some pages or features may work well on the desktop yet leave a lot to be desired on mobile.
• Name, email, custom property – Last but not least, you can add custom data to identify the users. These features allow you to match the recording with the user’s name, email, or other types of data. One of the most common custom properties is the pricing plan. This filter is also used for integrations with other SaaS apps.

Now that you know the most important filters, it’s time to move on to the next step: combining these into custom segments.

Custom segments for SaaS analytics

Need inspiration for your SaaS optimization strategy? Here are some of the custom segments we’re using ourselves:

• Segments for PPC campaigns – Analyze the user journeys and the behavior of visitors who came from Facebook, Google Ads, or other PPC marketing campaigns.
• User who visited page X – e.g., users who visited the Pricing, or the Features page. These key sections are usually the biggest SaaS conversion rate optimization challenges. You can see how they interacted with this information, how they got to this page and what were their next steps.
• A/B test segments – It’s a fast and easy way to gain more qualitative insight into your A/B tests! We enjoy this strategy so much we’ve created our own guide to A/B testing with session recordings. Check it out if you’d like to learn even more about growing SaaS businesses!
• Feature-focused segments – When you introduce a new feature, you can set up a dedicated segment for it. It’s an easy way to actually see how people interact with it! You can see even the slightest moments of doubt.

Now that we’ve mentioned A/B testing, it’s high time we moved on to the next step: LiveSession integrations.

Integrate with other SaaS tools

LiveSession offers a wide array of integrations with other SaaS tools. You can browse all of them in our integrations marketplace – and we’re constantly adding new ones, too!

Here are some of the highlights when it comes to SaaS optimization and growth:

• Google Optimize – You can easily set up an A/B test with the Google Optimize tool and analyze session recordings for different variants. Test variants appear as custom filters in LiveSession.
• Google Analytics, Heap, Segment, and Mixpanel – LiveSession recordings can appear as events in Google Analytics, Heap, Mixpanel and Segment. This way, you can analyze different kinds of data in one place.
• Sentry, Bugsnag, and Errorception – To top it all off, you can integrate LiveSession with the most popular bug tracking tools. This makes the workflow of your software developers much smoother! This way, it’s much easier to research the bug and find an optimal solution.
• Intercom, LiveChat, and other customer support tools – As you’re already aware, satisfying customer support is crucial for retention and, ultimately, growth. Your customer support agents can access LiveSession recordings straight from the conversation in LiveChat or Intercom. This way, they can provide relevant help faster.

SaaS and session recordings success story: RocketLink

Working with session recordings can result in visible, quantifiable growth. You don’t have to take our word for it – have a look at these numbers and results from RocketLink:

• Among other things, fixing discount code issues with LiveSession helped the company achieve a 110% increase in signups. Session recordings helped RocketLink find issues they wouldn’t spot otherwise.
• Reduced churn thanks to improved onboarding and discovered issues. These included users pasting an invalid format of the pixel ID and other bugs that couldn’t be reproduced otherwise. What’s more, they wouldn’t even discover many of the issues if not for LiveSession.
• Last but not least, RocketLink claims they’ve reached 40% more paid subscriptions thanks to improvements they’ve implemented with LiveSession.

Sounds promising? Read more in our RocketLink case study and see how a SaaS company can succeed with the help of the right session recording tool.

We hope this article has been a source of inspiration for you! Now that you know how to grow your SaaS business with session recordings, why not try them yourself?