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.
Find Session Replay in the left-hand sidebar in Amplitude Analytics.
Session Replay is available to try on all new Amplitude plans as of February 7, 2024 (including the Starter and Plus updates from October 2023). Existing Growth and Enterprise customers can also access Session Replay as an add-on purchase. Contact your account manager with questions. See our pricing page for more details.
Session Replay is not enabled by default, and requires instrumentation beyond the standard Amplitude instrumentation.
Session replay uses existing Amplitude tools and APIs to handle privacy and deletion requests.
While privacy laws and regulations vary across states and countries, certain constants exist, including the requirements to disclose in a privacy notice the categories of personal information you are collecting, the purposes for its use, and the categories of third parties with which personal information is shared. When implementing a session replay tool, you should review your privacy notice to make sure your disclosures remain accurate and complete. And as a best practice, review your notice with legal counsel to make sure it complies with the constantly evolving privacy laws and requirements applicable to your business and personal information data practices.
If your Amplitude plan includes Session Replay, Amplitude retains raw replay data for 30 days from the date of ingestion.
Purchase extra retention time, up to a maximum of 12 months. For more information, contact Amplitude Support.
If you purchase extra session volume, Amplitude retains raw replay data for up to 12 months from the date of ingestion. If you need a more strict policy, contact Amplitude support to set the value to 30 days.
Changes to the retention period impact replays ingested after the change. Sessions captured and ingested before a retention period change retain the previous retention period.
Replays that are outside of the retention period aren't viewable in Amplitude.
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 available when viewing a replay from a chart.)
Session Replay supports user sessions of any length.
To access Session Replay from a user’s event stream, use the User Look-Up feature. This can be helpful if a user has reported a potential bug during their session, or if you want to understand whether a user's experience is representative of a bigger trend.
Find the user with User Look-Up (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. You can generate a link to share the replay with your team from the view in a User Look-Up event stream. Click Copy URL from the view to copy the link.
To use Session Replay in a chart, follow these steps:
The replay view appears in the right-hand panel, where you can:
The user’s cursor movement displays as a red line, and masked HTML elements appear as a series of asterisks. Session Replay shows the timestamp of the session as it occurred.
Session Replay is available in the following Amplitude chart types, with these restrictions around each chart type's available metrics:
With Session Replay, your homepage shows 100 sessions captured over the past seven days. Each session displays its start time, user ID, session length, and country.
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.
To review your Session Replay quota and retention time frame, navigate to the Plans & Billing page for your organization.
To see an approximation of the number of sessions that have associated replays, create a User Sessions Chart and configure it to include all sessions with any active event, where the first property value of Session Replay ID
isn't equal to "(none)"
. This includes all session replays with a value.
Session replay gives you two options for searching replays: either by date, or with a filter.
Filtered results by date or time frame match the project's timezone.
Once you make your selection, view replays that took place within the selected time frame, or replays that meet your filter specifications. Your search results generate a unique URL that you can share with your team.
Keep in mind that if you apply a filter to exclude replays with a specific property value, Session Replay search returns results for all replays with a different value for that property, and replays with missing values for that property.
The list of results shows a maximum of 100 replays.
There are three ways you can add a Session Replay to a dashboard or notebook:
With Session Replay, you can:
There are some limitations when using Session Replay:
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August 28th, 2024
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