Introduction

StoreFront Recordings brings the power of an integrated session recorder to StoreFronts. Once enabled, you’ll be able to review session recordings associated with visitors to your site. Seeing exactly what your customers experienced will greatly improve your customer's experience and reducing friction points.

Pricing

StoreFront Recordings was designed to bring economical screen recording to your e-commerce operation. StoreFront Recordings is priced at $1 per 1,000 recordings with a free 14 day trial for each of your StoreFronts. With this pricing, UltraCart recordings are 50-85% less expensive than other commercial solutions in the screen recording space. While other solutions bill in large dollar increments, UltraCart only charges you as recordings are collected.

Common Usage Scenarios

• Viewing how customers are interacting with a new page design.

• Determining friction points and seeing how your customers reacted to them. You can even filter on rage click sessions.

• Finding script errors on your site.

• Viewing actual usage of your site in various form factors (especially mobile)

• Observing cross domain traffic from quiz sites, surveys, affiliates, etc.

Features

• Contextual Behavior - See what the user sees. Session recordings are captured in the orientation and context in which the user is experiencing the content.

• Advanced Filtering - Quickly create, apply and stack filters to create segments that meet your criteria. Save segments to easily view any new sessions that meet the filter criteria.

• Flexible Implementation - Go beyond your StoreFront! Simply embed the screen recording script on any of your web properties to record and view sessions as users navigate and interact with content.

• UTM and Event Data - Each page within the session provides a detailed breakdown of the available UTM parameters. Event data and details are provided as the session playback progresses through each page.

• Favorite and Share Sessions - Mark important sessions as favorites to save and view these in the future. Share individual sessions with other members on your account.

• Advanced Privacy Protection - User passwords, payment information and other sensitive data are hidden and protected during the session recording process. 

Setup

Within your StoreFront, navigate to the Recording section as shown below.

Open

Next click on the Settings sub-tab, enable recording, and save.

Open

The cost for StoreFront Recordings is $1 per 1,000 sessions recorded. This is 50-85% less expensive than the typical external screen recording solutions on the market. In addition to a cost savings, this recording solution is intimately integrated into the UltraCart platform and understands the actual events happening.

Tracking for External Websites

If you are using your StoreFront in checkout only mode then you will want to deploy a tracking script to your external website. This script will enable recording on the external website so that you are able to view a seamless session across both domains. Just click the copy button the script that is provided on the settings page and then deploy it to your external site. This script is compatible with Google Tag Manager.

Sessions

After enabling StoreFront Recordings, sessions will begin appearing within one hour. A session associated with a successfully placed order will appear within two minutes of the order being placed.

The most recent sessions will display on the sessions page as shown below.

The overview data will include:

• Email (if known)

• Order ID if one was placed

• Whether the session has been watched by someone

• Duration

• Device information

• Number of pages

• Date when the session recording happened.

Most of the columns are sortable. You can click on the column header to change the sort order of the page.

To view a particular session, click on the eye-ball button associated with that particular session as shown below.

To favorite a particular session, click on the star icon associated with the particular session. Once it’s favorited the icon will show as a solid black star. Click it again to unfavorite it.

Filtering

Watching individual sessions can often be overwhelming given the large number that your StoreFront may generate. Filtering provides the optimal way to segment the sessions into a smaller group to make viewing possible. To apply a filter click on the filter sessions button.

A filter dialog will appear as shown below:

Once you click on the Add Filter button, you can choose the type of filter to apply:

The different types of filters that you can apply are summarized below:

• Communication

  • Campaigns

  • Flows

  • Marketing e-mail Subject

• Device

  • Device Type

  • Operating Session

  • User Agent

  • Session

  • Date

  • Duration

  • Page Count

  • UTM Parameters

  • Order

  • Order ID

  • Order Contains Item ID

• User

  • IP Address

  • Email Address

  • Unique Visitor ID

• Page

  • Page URL Criteria

  • Page Visit Duration

  • Page Parameters or Events
    
    

After you’ve applied your filter, you can save the filter as a segment.

Viewing a Session

The bulk of the viewer is the actual recording that is playing back. The player will show the actual screen size of the customer’s browser if possible and scale it down proportionally if necessary.

On the right hand side of the page is the session information. This will display the URL of each page, how long they spent on the page and the event stream for that page.

The info tab on the right hand side of the page will display further information about the session. This section will also allow for merchant notes and tagging of the session.

Console Recorder

While viewing a session, you can also view the console output that was collected. Console output can often give you further content about what a customer was doing. This is especially helpful if you are recording a page where you have written a lot of custom JavaScript.

Segments

Segments are saved filters that provide quick access for later review. Segments are access from the menu as shown below.

When you first visit the segments tab, no saved segments will be available. To make getting started easier, we have 15+ recommended segments that are commonly looked at.

For example there is the “Page Not Found” segment. You can add this recommended segment to your saved segments by clicking the “+ Add Segment” button or quickly view all the sessions for this segment by clicking on the “View Filter” button

Once a segment has been added to the saved segments, there is a description of what the segment is filtering on, the number of sessions that match this segment (up to 10,000), and when the segment was created. The buttons allow you to edit the segment, duplicate the segment, view the segment and delete the segment.

Viewing a Session Associated with an Order

When looking at a particular order under Operations → Order Management → View All Orders, you can hover over the Tools menu and then click View Screen Recording. This will take you directly to the screen recording for that particular order in a new browser tab.

Limited Permissions to View Recordings

You may wish to give individuals within your organization the ability to access StoreFront Recordings without giving them full access to your StoreFront. Within the user editor (Configuration → Account → Users), you can enable the individual permission as shown below:

Recording Custom Events

You can push additional events into the recording timeline using JavaScript on your site. Below is an example of pushing the answer to a Leads Hook question in as an event. Line three of this example sets up the global _uca array if it does not already exist. Lines 6-12 pushes the actual event. An event always have a name. The event can also have a “params” object which contains one or more parameters as key/values. This is arbitrary in nature.

If you fire an event with the name of “discard” then the entire session recording will be disposed of.

Receiving Screen Recording Data via Webhook

The meta data object that contains all the details about the screen recording is available as a webhook event. You can receive this data, store it in your own data stores, and mine the information to meet your business needs. The screen recording object is a descriptive object detailing everything the user did during the recording session including the events. You can configure this webhook event as shown below within the Webhook system.

Accessing Screen Recording Data via BigQuery

The screen recording system is integrated with the Data Warehouse for BigQuery. Screen recording data, similar to what is delivered via Webhook, flows in near real-time into the BigQuery database. From there a developer can write SQL queries to mine the recording data.

This integration makes it easier and more cost effective for merchants to build customized business dashboards to track the performance of their lines of business, website funnels, etc. using BigQuery and looks like Google Data Studio or Power BI.

Related Documentation

HeatMaps