In today's SaaS landscape, almost everyone tracks product data but struggling to answer a simple question: "Why are users doing what they're doing?" While traditional analytics tell you what happened, they often leave you guessing about the underlying user behavior and intentions. This playbook is your practical guide to leveraging session replay capabilities to bridge that understanding gap.

Starting with the fundamentals of user behavior analysis, we'll progress through setting up meaningful metrics, configuring custom events, and establishing automated alerts that matter. No theoretical fluff—just practical steps to help you understand your users' digital experience and make informed product decisions.

Understanding the Basics of User Behavior

Is there any difference between User Behavior Analysis and Product Analytics?

User behavior analysis examines individual interactions at a granular level, focusing on the "why" behind user actions. Product analytics takes a broader view, looking at higher-level metrics to understand the "what" of product performance. While related, these approaches offer distinct perspectives on user engagement and product success.

Choosing the right tools

To start analyzing user behavior, you need the right tools. At the core of this workflow is a session replay solution that can capture and replay user interactions with your digital product. We suggest using our app - LiveSession

Integrating LiveSession is straightforward. Just add a short snippet code to your site or app—it takes about 10 minutes. Need technical help? Check our guide. Or, try our sample dataset to explore LiveSession's capabilities before implementing.

With the tracking code in place, you'll be able to start recording user sessions and diving into the wealth of behavioral data available. But simply capturing sessions is just the first step - the true power lies in how you analyze and act on those insights. That's where the real work begins.

User Behavior Checklist for Beginners

Once you have the right tools in place to understand your users' actions, you can start exploring different ways to track and analyze their behavior. As a beginner, here's a helpful checklist to get you started. The steps outlined below will guide you through progressively more sophisticated ways to explore, measure, and act on user behavior insights

1. Explore dashboards: We'll start by familiarizing you with the core dashboards and metrics available in your user behavior analytics platform
2. Analyze Sessions: Watch user sessions that match specific metric filters and observe real user interactions to identify friction points and opportunities for improvement.
3. Create Custom Metrics: Leverage the flexibility of your analytics tool to build custom metrics tailored to your unique business needs. This will unlock valuable perspectives beyond the out-of-the-box dashboards.
4. Implement Custom Events: Take customization a step further by tracking bespoke user actions that are crucial to your product or service. Gain deeper visibility into your key activation events.
5. Set Up Alerts: Automate the monitoring of important user behavior changes by configuring alerts that notify your team in real-time, such as spikes in sign-ups or drops in conversions.

Step 1: Explore Dashboards

Now that you have LiveSession set up, it's time to dive into the wealth of data at your fingertips. The first step in your user behavior analysis journey is to explore the pre-built dashboards. These dashboards offer a quick overview of key metrics.

Here are some specific actions to get you started with exploring dashboards in LiveSession:

Examine the Session Duration metric: Find the average session duration metric on one of the default dashboards. This metric gives you an initial insight into how long users are engaging with your product.

View the metric definition: Click on the card metric and expand the definition to understand exactly what it's measuring and how it's calculated.

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Switch to Active Session Duration: As an exercise add a more accurate representation of user engagement, change the metric to "Active Session Duration". This filters out idle time and focuses on periods of active interaction.

Experiment with display types: Try changing the display typ "Dimensional". This allows you to group the data by different attributes, such as browser type, giving you a comparative view of metrics across different user segments.

By exploring these dashboards and metrics, you're laying the groundwork for deeper user behavior analysis. Luckily, LiveSession offers you a smooth transition from quantitative data in metrics to real user session recordings. This powerful combination allows you to not only see the numbers but also understand the 'why' behind user actions.

Step 2: Analyze Sessions

This step allows you to bridge the gap between quantitative data and qualitative insights. Here are some specific actions to get started with session analysis in LiveSession:

1. Filter sessions based on metrics: Analyze the recordings matching the filters of the metrics you explored in Step 1. Just scroll down and start binge watching sessions.
2. As you watch these filtered sessions, pay close attention to how users navigate your product. Look for patterns in their behavior, moments of hesitation, or actions that seem counterintuitive.‍
3. Identify friction points: Take note of any areas where users seem to struggle or get stuck. These could be potential opportunities for improvement in your product's user experience.‍
4. Look for unexpected behaviors: Sometimes, users might use your product in ways you didn't anticipate. These insights can be valuable for feature development or marketing strategies.

By combining the power of LiveSession's metrics with its session replay capabilities, you can gain a deeper understanding of the 'why' behind user actions. This approach allows you to not only see what users are doing but also understand their motivations and pain points, leading to more informed product decisions.

Step 3: Create Custom Metrics

One of the most powerful features of LiveSession is its flexibility in creating custom metrics tailored to your specific needs. Unlike many analytics tools that come with a fixed set of predefined dashboards, LiveSession allows you to build metrics that align perfectly with your unique business goals and user behavior patterns.

Here are some specific actions to get you started with creating custom metrics in LiveSession:

1. Create a trend metric for homepage sessions: Set up a trend metric with a URL filter containing the "home" substring. This will show you the total number of sessions that included a visit to your homepage over time.

2. Track unique homepage visitors: Similar to the previous metric, create another trend metric with a URL filter for "home", but this time set it to count unique users. This will give you insights into how many individual users are visiting your homepage.

3. Compare Mac vs. Windows: Create a dimensional metric grouped by the "system" property. This will allow you to see how your usage is split between Mac and Windows users.

4. Monitor a key user action: If you've set up custom events (which we'll cover in the next step), create a number metric that counts occurrences of that event. For example, if "Subscription started" is a crucial action for your business, set up a metric to track it.

By creating these custom metrics, you're taking the first step towards a more personalized and insightful analytics setup. These metrics will provide you with a solid foundation for understanding user behavior specific to your product or website.

Step 4: Add Custom Events

Now that you've explored the pre-built metrics and created some custom ones, it's time for custom events. Custom events allow you to track specific actions that are unique to your product or business, providing deeper insights into user behavior.

Here's why custom events are crucial:

• Tailored tracking: They allow you to monitor actions that are specific to your product and business goals.
• Deeper insights: Custom events can reveal patterns in user behavior that standard metrics might miss.

To get started with custom events in LiveSession, follow these steps:

1. Identify key actions: Determine which user actions are most important for your business. For example, if you run an online booking platform for patients the custom event can be: appointment booked, appointment started or booking canceled.
2. Implement the events: You can find a detailed technical guide on how to do this here: Custom Events Guide.
3. Create metrics for custom events: Once you've implemented custom events, create new metrics in LiveSession to track their occurrence. This will allow you to monitor these important actions over time.
4. Analyze the data: Use the new custom event data to gain deeper insights into user behavior. Look for patterns, such as which actions lead to higher engagement or conversion rates.

For example, if your app allows patients to book appointments, a valuable custom event could be "Appointment Scheduled". By tracking this event, you can gain insights into how many users are completing this key action, at what point in their journey they're doing so, and what factors might influence this behavior.

Custom events bring powerful insights that can drive product improvements and business growth. They allow you to focus on the actions that matter most to your specific use case, providing a more nuanced understanding of user behavior.

Step 5: Set Up Alerts

Now that you've set up custom events, it's time to leverage them for real-time insights. LiveSession offers a powerful feature called alerts that can notify you instantly when specific user behaviors occur. This allows you to stay on top of important trends and respond quickly to user actions.

Here are some specific powerful alerts to track:

1. Set up a Slack notification for new sign-ups: Create an alert that sends a message to a dedicated #accounts Slack channel whenever a new user signs up. This keeps your team informed about growth in real-time.
2. Create an alert for new subscriptions: Configure an alert to notify a #subscriptions Slack channel when a user starts a new subscription or faces issues with completing the payment.

By setting up these alerts, you'll be able to stay informed in real time and respond promptly to important events or trends related to user behavior.

Next Steps

Now that you've learned about the various aspects of user behavior analysis, it's time to put your knowledge into practice. Here are some more advanced playbooks crafted by our team.

• Free-to-paid conversion Playbook
• Usability Testing Playbook
• Account-Based Analytics Playbook: Monitor and analyze user behavior at the account level to unlock high-value customer insights

Remember, user behavior analysis is an ongoing process. By maintaining a user-centric focus and leveraging the power of data, you'll be well-equipped to drive meaningful improvements in your product and business outcomes.

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