Session Replay Q&A with Mixpanel Senior Product Manager DJ Satoda

Session Replay gives our customers the ability to watch replays of user sessions so they can better understand where users are struggling with issues, getting confused or stuck, or facing errors. For the first time, we’re giving our customers the ability to combine quantitative with qualitative, the “what” and the “why,” all in one place.

For example, one illustrative use case we hear variations of often is looking at a funnel chart, seeing Chrome conversion rates from "Watch Video" to "Purchase" trending poorly (relative to Safari), and wondering, “What might be going wrong?”

It's the ability to double-click into that report and instantly watch a few replays of the users that "Watched Video" but didn’t convert in one workflow, without switching between tools. It's finally being able to answer the natural follow-up questions that Mixpanel begets. That’s what our Session Replay is all about.

Historically, session replay has been offered as a standalone platform. What makes Mixpanel’s version unique is the fact that the replays are combined directly with your event tracking.

Within Mixpanel, you not only have world-class quantitative analysis tools like Funnels, Insights, and the ability to slice and dice those reports by different event and profile properties. You can now also continue your explorations with a qualitative dimension by clicking through reports to actually see the replays of users going through any flow.

With incumbent session replay providers, you end up staring at mountains of replays, without a good idea of where to start. It’s also difficult to get a sense for the scale of problems you discover within session replays. Once you discover a user pain point, you inevitably ask:

Other solutions are also built more for unstructured replay watching. One of our competitors even promotes the idea of "replay parties" where they sit for an hour and watch replays together. While this is a great ritual to do occasionally for exploratory problem discovery, this is generally a lower ROI use of your time. Oftentimes, product teams are already exceptionally busy and need help understanding known problems more deeply. What they don't need is to wandering through hours of replays hoping to discover more problems. 

We also enable you to watch replays for both front-end and back-end events! This functionality is unique to Mixpanel enabling you to see the full user journey and jump straight from reports to replays for any event, no matter how it was tracked—SDKs, APIs, or even synced from your data warehouse.

Mixpanel’s Session Replay functionality fits right into your existing workflows. As you analyze data in your our charts, you can jump directly into replays that contain the events you’re analyzing. You can analyze conversion rates directly from a Funnels chart, then you can dive into the specific replays that you care about and quickly understand what's going right or wrong. It's the best possible way to derive valuable insights really quickly.

Absolutely, our Session Replay works with customers that ingest data using CDPs like Segment,  mParticle, Rudderstack, and even Google Tag Manager. 

It's very simple. Like our normal implementations of Mixpanel Session Replay, it starts with one line of code in your SDK initialization to determine what percent of sessions you want to record.

From there, all you'll need to do is copy and paste another short snippet of code that ties together your user identification and our SDK and your CDP's SDK. Super quick and easy. 

In many ways, our Replay Player will feel very familiar. You have the fundamental and familiar ability to rewatch a user's session as it happened, change the playback speed, and automatically fast forward through sections where a user is inactive. You can also share links with your team to different, interesting replays. 

Our Replay Feed is really what makes our Session Replay feature interesting because it allows you to watch your Mixpanel events side-by-side with the corresponding replays. In this way, you can see what Mixpanel events are happening during each replay.

That's really powerful because it allows you to do things like show you only the replays where a Like or Dislike event happened. If I'm a product manager that's in charge of social collaboration features, that allows me to rapidly jump back-and-forth between replays to only the key moments that I care about. Instead of autotrack solutions that are inundated with low-value browser interactions, now you can just jump specifically to the parts of the replays that are most valuable to you. 

For product managers, it's a great way to do problem discovery and understand how users are utilizing your feature, what's going well and what's not going well.

It's a great way to build alignment on your teams to be like, “Hey, here's a clear problem that we think we should solve and here's a replay that shows that problem.” Personally, I love using it that way because it helps make the problems very salient very quickly.

It also helps when I do product reviews to say to my leadership, “Hey, we made this improvement. Here's the quantitative impact we drove, and also here's the qualitative impact—a replay of this experience getting better for a user.” That just makes it really clear the impact that you're driving.

There’s also value for non-product personas. Designers often use session replay to better understand user pain points and workflows. It's a great way to see what users are doing organically, like you would maybe with an observability test. You can watch a user go through a specific flow, without needing to bring that user in-office or schedule a video conference call. Session Replay is a great user research option that feels scalable, and it's easier on your calendar. 

For engineers and support teams, Session Replay is huge because it lets them click into support tickets or error reports to see an exact replay of what happened when a user submitted a support ticket. This allows your team to quickly debug and triage what's exactly going wrong when a user writes in for support.

It depends on your use case! The most common use cases we see with Session Replay are:

We don’t recommend sampling for the first two use cases. For debugging use cases, if you sample at all, you will miss replays where users encountered issues. For new feature monitoring use cases, you may miss replays containing key insights (highlights, crashes) during a critical time period. Further, if you want to watch replays of different cohorts of users (e.g., free vs. paid, enterprise vs. SMB), you may not have enough replays for every breakdown you want.

For general product awareness use cases, sampling can be a great option. You don’t need every single replay to get a sense of how things are doing overall. 

If you already use Mixpanel, total page loads can be a good way to estimate the amount of replays you’ll need. If you use timeout-based query sessions, Total Session Start events in the Insights report could be a good estimate. Then, when you enable Session Replay, use that metric and the sampling percentage to determine how many replays will be sent.

I’d also recommend that you reach out to our support team or your account manager if you have specific questions about your use cases.

Mixpanel is equipped with enterprise-grade data protection, and we take privacy and security seriously. For Session Replay specifically, all on-screen text elements are masked by default and we give you full control to choose what, where, and whom you record. Plus, we only store recordings for 30 days and have robust security protocols dictating which settings cannot be overwritten. Rest assured that your customer data is always safe.