Using Statcounter

See How Visitors Are Really Experiencing Your Site With Session Replay

Remove the guesswork and see visually how your visitors are clicking, tapping, scrolling and navigating your website.

Session Replay is a new feature in Statcounter designed to give you deeper visitor insights by enabling you to play back a visual recording of each visitor session, showing you exactly what your visitors saw and did in their browser as they navigated your website.

This new feature will help you see your website as you've never seen it before — through the eyes of your visitors as they are using it. See what works on your website, what breaks, where things can be improved and the friction points and frustrations that may be turning your visitors away, resulting in losing valuable conversions and sales.

As with all new features we add to Statcounter, ease of use is our number one priority so we have kept Session Replay simple. Let's take a look at how it works.

Choosing a Session to Replay

Sessions in Statcounter can be played from the Visitor Activity or Visitor Paths reports. These reports include valuable information about each session such as session length, number of pageviews, browser, device and location information. Previewing and filtering your sessions based on this visitor information can be helpful for shortlisting the sessions that warrant further investigation.

To replay a session:

  1. While logged in to Statcounter, visit your Projects page and select the relevant project.
  2. Expand the Recent Activity menu in the left navigation sidebar and select Visitor Activity or Visitor Paths.
  3. Click or tap the circular play button to replay the session.

Note: An outline version of the play button will appear for sessions you have played previously. You can replay sessions as many times as you wish.

Watching a Session

When you click the play button, a new window opens and plays a visual recording of what that visitor saw and did in their browser while they were on your website. This includes all the pages they visited, their clicks / taps and mouse movements, scrolling, form interactions and any periods of inactivity.

Understanding The Timeline

As the session plays back, the various types of visitor activity are represented on the player timeline using different line styles and icons. This can be useful to see at a glance what your visitor did and click forward on the timeline to watch particular activities. You can hover over the timeline and icons for details. Here are the timeline events you may come across.

Player Controls

The play / pause button on the far left enables you to pause the playback at any stage. At the end of the session, the play button replays the session from the beginning. You can also click anywhere on the timeline to move the play position to that location.

To the right of the play / pause button is the playback speed control. Sometimes you may wish to speed up or slow down playback to focus on certain sections, while the Skip Activity toggle switch will speed over periods of inactivity.

Sharing Recordings

To share recordings with someone who doesn't have a Statcounter account, for example with a client or a team member, you can get a special shareable link using the Share button in the bottom right of the recording screen.

When you've finished watching a session, the link at the top left of the screen will take you back to Visitor Activity or Visitor Paths.

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17 Comments

  • Posted on Nov 17 2023 at 18:52 by blumberberry
    I remember at one point it used to show in the preview when someone was watching a video -- so you would see the video playing in the recording. Now, everytime a video shows up, its just all white. You see nothing.

    Even if the video isn't even playing...you don't see it. Like the embded video player itself is gone. You can only see text and pictures in the recording now. It didnt use to be like this
  • Posted on Nov 15 2023 at 21:38 by kurac707
    i'm a few days into the free trial and after watching a few replays i can watch them no more... why is this? what's the point of a 30 day free trial if it's partial...
    • Posted on Nov 16 2023 at 10:41 by jonathanmorton
      Hi, the Statcounter code does not appear to be installed correctly on your Tumblr blog. Please contact support for further help: https://statcounter.com/support/contact/
  • Posted on Aug 2 2022 at 11:46 by guy.sela@cropaia.com
    I would like to record only specific URLs, not all. is that possible?
    • Posted on Aug 2 2022 at 14:25 by jonathanmorton
      Session Replay will record all pages on your website that have the Statcounter code installed. This is to make it possible to see the complete journey visitors take through your website.You can use filters to only show recordings that include particular URLs - not what you were asking but may be useful. https://statcounter.com/support/session-replay-filters/
      Comment edited on Aug 2 2022 at 14:49
  • Posted on Jun 30 2022 at 22:20 by stockup
    I would like to see how Session Replay works but when I click on the Replay icon it says that my demo period has expired. I apparently missed the demo email so how can i get a demo?

    • Posted on Jul 7 2022 at 08:39 by jonathanmorton
      We have just restarted the Session Replay trial for you. Thanks for trying it and let us know how you get on!
  • Posted on May 22 2022 at 18:49 by Simonalkenmayer
    As soon as I purchased the right to use it, all the play buttons vanished. Seems like it might be a waste of money.
  • Posted on Nov 9 2021 at 19:03 by golioth78
    How much is this going to cost?
  • Posted on Oct 27 2021 at 22:47 by crog
    I signed up for the 30-day trial and all the replay buttons disappeared. Guess can't test that out!
    • Posted on Oct 28 2021 at 09:20 by jonathanmorton
      Thanks for letting us know. We will investigate this for you.
      • Posted on May 22 2022 at 18:49 by Simonalkenmayer
        I bought the feature and all my play buttons disappeared also
  • Posted on Sep 7 2021 at 12:34 by amrogers
    So on all my replays, you can't see any of the youtube videos recorded in the activity. So either they are loading at all for my visitors or they don't show up on these recordings. Can you let me know if the recording shows youtube videos on the page?
    Comment edited on Sep 7 2021 at 12:35
    • Posted on Sep 7 2021 at 14:05 by jonathanmorton
      Hi, your YouTube videos should be loading fine for your visitors but because they are embedded third party content, we are unable to render them in the recordings. We will look at maybe adding a placeholder in recordings where video content can't be rendered.
  • Posted on Aug 30 2021 at 20:07 by nukeban
    So show us a video of this in action?
    • Posted on Aug 31 2021 at 08:25 by jonathanmorton
      Hi, you can see it directly for yourself. On your Visitor Activity or Visitor Paths page, click the play button with the dashed blue outline to start a trial of Session replay.

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