Understand customer behavior with Session Replay

Session Replay use cases

• Deepen your understanding of user session activity with a qualitative lens

Sometimes you need to go beyond a funnel analysis to understand the "why" behind your product metrics. Amplitude's built-in Session Replay feature gives full visibility in the customer journey by uncovering qualitative insights from your quantitative data. It brings digital experiences to life, unlocking growth bottlenecks and giving you the confidence to take appropriate action.

With Session Replay, you can:

• Improve conversions: Gain qualitative insights and context around user activity after you’ve analyzed quantitative trends with Event Segmentation, Funnel Analysis, Journeys, and User Sessions charts.
• Diagnose product issues faster: Follow along with the replay of a specific user’s session to troubleshoot bugs or gain insight into the overall user experience.
• Identify significant UX behaviors: Find out if a single user is representative of a larger macro trend by generating an Event Segmentation or Funnel Analysis chart from a replay in User Lookup.

NOTE: Session Replay can only be used to segment by users, and isn't available for account-level reporting.

Use Session Replay to review user activity

You can launch a session replay from a user’s event stream, inside a chart, or from your homepage. Replays are generally available for viewing five minutes after a session begins.

When viewing a session replay from your homepage or from a search, the user's event stream syncs with the replay. You can select an event from the stream, and the replay jumps to that point in the session. (This feature isn't yet available when viewing a replay from a chart.)

Session Replay has no limit on the length of a session you can view as a replay.

To access Session Replay from a user's event stream, use the User Lookup feature.

Error analytics and console logs

Session Replay can capture and display technical errors and console logs that occur during user sessions. This helps you understand whether technical issues are impacting user experience and correlate errors with drops in conversion or engagement.

When enabled, Session Replay captures:

• JavaScript console logs: Console messages, warnings, and errors logged by your application
• Network errors: Failed network requests and API calls
• Runtime errors: JavaScript errors that occur during the session

View console logs in a replay

To view console logs and errors in a session replay:

1. Open a session replay from a chart, User Lookup, or the Session Replay list.
2. Look for the console icon in the replay interface.
3. Click the console icon to expand the console log view.

The console view displays logs, warnings, and errors in chronological order alongside the session timeline. You can click on any log entry to jump to that moment in the replay.

Enable or disable console logs

Admins and managers can enable or disable console log capture through organization settings:

1. Navigate to Settings > Organization Settings.
2. Go to the Session Replay & Heatmaps section.
3. Toggle the Console Logs setting on or off for your projects.

Changes to this setting apply to future session captures only.

Analyze error events

Error events captured during sessions appear in your event stream, and you can analyze them like any other event. You can:

• Use Event Segmentation to measure error frequency and trends
• Include error events in Funnel Analysis to see how errors impact conversion
• Filter session replays by error events to focus on problematic sessions

This helps quantify the business impact of technical issues and prioritize fixes based on data.

Frustration analytics

Session Replay automatically detects and highlights user frustration signals during playback. These signals help you identify UX problems that may not be obvious in traditional analytics.

Frustration event types

• Rage clicks: When users rapidly click the same element multiple times, usually indicating something isn't working as expected. This often means a button or link appears interactive but doesn't respond.
• Dead clicks: When users click on elements that appear clickable but have no functionality—such as non-interactive images styled like buttons or links that lead nowhere.

View frustration events in replays

Frustration events appear directly in the session timeline and event stream, making them easy to spot:

1. Open a session replay.
2. Look for rage click and dead click indicators in the timeline.
3. Click on a frustration event to jump to that moment in the replay.

Like error events, you can analyze frustration events using Event Segmentation and Funnel Analysis to understand their impact on user behavior and conversion rates.

View Session Replay from a chart

To use Session Replay in a chart, follow these steps:

1. Open the Amplitude chart that contains the events you want to look at.

2. Open the Microscope and click View User Streams.

3. Check the Streams with session replays box.

4. Click Play Session in the event stream to play the events directly below it.

The replay view appears in the right-hand panel, where you can:

• Expand the view
• Pause replay
• Skip forward and backwards by 10-second increments
• Speed up and down
• Skip periods of inactivity

The user's cursor movement appears as a red line, and masked HTML elements show a series of asterisks. Session Replay shows the timestamp of the session as it occurred.

Availability in Amplitude charts

Session Replay supports the following Amplitude chart types, with these restrictions around each chart type's available metrics:

• Event Segmentation: Session replay supports all six measures.
• Funnel Analysis: Session replay is only available for the conversion measure.
• Journeys: Session replay supports the Pathfinder and Journey Map visualizations.
• User Sessions: Session replay supports all six measures.

NOTE: For Funnel Analysis charts, the order of events appears in chronological order (oldest to newest).

View Session Replay from your homepage

With Session Replay, your homepage shows 100 sessions captured over the past seven days. Each session shows its start time, user ID, session length, and country.

NOTE: If you can’t see the Session Replay widget and have a customized home page, reset the home page and then re-add your customizations to make the widget visible.

Click Play to see the session view in the modal that appears.

View the number of captured replays

To see the number of captured replays, create an Event Segmentation chart:

1. Select the [Amplitude] Replay Captured event.
2. Group by the [Amplitude] Session Replay ID event property.
3. In the formula, use PROPCOUNT(A) to count distinct session replay IDs.

This formula returns the number of distinct property values for the property by which the event is grouped. In this example, the formula retrieves the number of different session replay IDs.

Search for a replay

Session replay gives you two options for searching replays: either by date, or through a filter.

1. Navigate to Users & Sessions—>Session Replays to see the complete list of session replays available for viewing.
2. To narrow the list by date, click the calendar icon above the list and select the starting and ending dates you want to use. You can also use a preset timeframe, such as seven days, 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days, by clicking the relevant button.
3. To narrow the list with a filter, click + Add Filter. You can filter by cohorts, events, event properties, and user properties. You can also use multiple filters to further narrow your list.

After you make your selection, the list of available replays includes only replays that took place within your selected timeframe or replays that meet your filter specifications.

Link directly to a replay

You can construct a direct URL to link to a specific session replay. This is useful for sharing replays programmatically or embedding links in external tools.

Using the following URL structure:

https://app.[eu.]amplitude.com/analytics/<orgUrl>/session-replay/project/<projectId>/search/replay?sessionReplayId=<replayId>

Replace the following placeholders:

For example:

https://app.amplitude.com/analytics/myorg/session-replay/project/123456/search/replay?sessionReplayId=abc123def456

Common use cases

Some common use cases for Session Replay include:

• Watch session activity to troubleshoot a bug: A user has reported a potential bug during their session. Find the user through User Lookup (you'll need their user ID to do this), then click Play Session next to the session you're looking for in the event stream. The replay appears to the right, where you can review session activity.
• Identify trends: To understand if a single user is representative of a bigger trend, find the user through the User Lookup. In the event stream, select up to 10 events you want to review and click Create Chart. Choose either an Event Segmentation or Funnel Analysis chart and click Create. The chart appears in the modal that opens.

NOTE: You can generate a link to share the replay with your team from the view in a User Lookup event stream. Click Copy URL from the view to copy the link.

Limitations

There are some limitations when using Session Replay:

• Session Replay supports web-based applications only. This includes mobile web.
• You can replay captured sessions for up to three months after they occur.
• Some HTML elements aren't supported and aren't captured as part of the replay:
  • Canvas
  • WebGL
  • object elements: Plugins such as Flash, Java, Silverlight, etc., with the exception of object type="image"
  • Lottie Animations (web and mobile)
  • iFrames not from origin
  • Assets that require authentication (e.g. fonts, CSS files, and images)