Session Replays
Record and replay visitor sessions to understand behaviour, debug problems, and see exactly what somebody experienced on your website.
Overview
Session Replays lets you watch real visitor sessions back as if you were looking over their shoulder. Clicks, scrolls, page navigation and form input are captured and played back in a video-like player inside your dashboard. It is invaluable for reproducing bug reports and for finding the places where your interface trips people up.
Navigate to Audience → Session Replays to open the replay library.
Enabling Session Replays
Recording is done by the Yaplet chat widget, and it is off until you turn it on:
- Open Brand → (your brand) → Chat widget in the sidebar.
- Go to the Features tab.
- Find the SDK Features section.
- Turn on Session Replays.
- Press Save Changes. ::
Under Recording Rules in the same section you can narrow what gets recorded to particular pages or particular visitors; left alone, every page is recorded.
Audience.SessionReplays), and that right is what makes the SDK Features section and the Session Replays screen appear at all. So if the toggle is nowhere to be found, check the module first; if a colleague cannot find it while you can, they have not been granted the right.Once enabled, the widget records sessions with rrweb — a lightweight session-recording library. Recordings are uploaded in segments and stitched back together into full journeys on the server.
Replay Library
The Session Replays page shows a searchable table of recorded journeys:
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Visitor | The visitor's email, name or identifier, with their country flag |
| Device | Desktop or mobile |
| Widget | Which chat widget captured the session, shown with its avatar |
| Duration | Total session length in MM:SS format |
| Pages | Number of pages visited during the session |
| Segments | How many recording segments make up the journey |
| Importance | Importance level (Low, Medium, High, Critical) with its score |
| Created | When the session was recorded |
Filtering
Use the filter bar and the date picker to find specific sessions:
- Date range — limit the list to sessions recorded within a period
- Visitor — search by the visitor's name, email or ID
- Widget — narrow down to sessions from specific chat widgets
- Importance — show only sessions at certain importance levels
- Device — mobile or desktop sessions
Importance Scoring
Every session is scored automatically, and the highest-scoring segment sets the level for the whole journey. The score goes up with:
- Rage clicks — repeated clicks in the same area, which usually mean frustration
- Console errors — JavaScript errors that happened during the session
- Network errors — failed requests
- Custom events — events your own code tracked through the SDK
- Session length, number of recorded events and pages visited — longer, busier sessions score higher
- Identified visitor — a small bonus for sessions from people you have identified
The score translates into four levels: Low, Medium, High and Critical. High and critical sessions are the ones most likely to reveal a real problem.
Watching a Replay
Click the play icon on any row to open the replay journey. The window has two panels.
Segment Sidebar
The left panel lists the segments that make up the journey, each with its number, its importance level, its address and its length. Click one to load it in the player. Where the visitor was idle for more than half a minute between two segments, the gap is drawn between them with its length. A switch at the top plays the next segment automatically when the current one ends.
Replay Player
The right panel is the player:
- Play / Pause — start or stop playback
- Progress scrubber — drag to jump anywhere in the recording
- Speed — 0.5x, 1x, 1.5x or 2x
- Skip idle — compress periods of inactivity so you only watch the parts where something happened
- Interaction markers — dots above the progress bar mark clicks, typing and scrolling; click one to jump to that moment
- Fullscreen — expand the player to the whole window
Pinning a Recording
The bookmark icon on a row pins a journey. Pinned journeys float to the top of the list and — more importantly — are never removed to make room for newer ones. At most half of a chat widget's recording slots can be held by pinned journeys, so a pin can be refused when you are already at that half.
Session Replays in Tickets
When a visitor submits a ticket while session replays are enabled, the recording of their session is attached to it. Open the ticket and choose View replay to watch it without hunting through the library — you see exactly what they were doing when they wrote to you.
How It Works
Under the hood, rrweb captures changes to the page, mouse movement, clicks, scrolling and input as lightweight JSON snapshots rather than screenshots or video, so the playback is a faithful reconstruction of the page rather than a film of it. A new segment is written roughly once a minute and whenever the visitor hides or leaves the page; all the segments from one browsing session are grouped into a journey.
gl-mask on an element replaces its text with placeholder characters, and gl-block blanks the element out entirely.How Long Recordings Are Kept
Recordings are limited by your plan rather than by age. Each chat widget gets a number of recording slots; a longer, heavier recording takes up more than one. When the slots are full, the oldest unpinned journey is deleted to make room.
The nightly cleanup that removes long-idle visitors never touches somebody who owns a session replay, so a recording does not disappear because its visitor stopped coming back.