Using Heatwave
Session recordings
Watch replays of real visits, with typing and personal details hidden.
A recording lets you watch a real visit to your store: the pages, scrolling, clicks and mouse movement, in order. It’s the quickest way to understand why a shopper got stuck.
What a recording is
A recording is not a video of the shopper’s screen. Heatwave saves a copy of your page’s structure plus the shopper’s movements, and replays them like a video. Nothing outside your store is captured.
Anything typed and personal details are hidden in the shopper’s browser before the data is sent. See Masking below.
The Recordings page
Visits where something went wrong are listed first.
Worth watching shows up to three visits where something stopped the shopper, meaning a high-severity behaviour pattern such as a failed add to cart or angry repeated clicks.
All recorded visits lists every recording with:
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| What happened | The most serious behaviour patterns found, or “Nothing unusual”. |
| First page | The page the visit started on. |
| Device | Phone, Tablet or Computer. |
| Pages | Number of pages viewed. |
| Length | How long the visit lasted. |
| Result | Bought, Added to cart, or No cart. |
| When | Date and time of the visit. |
Filters
- What happened: only visits with a specific behaviour pattern.
- Result: Didn’t add to cart, Added to cart or Bought.
- Device: Phone, Tablet or Computer.
- Period: Last 7, 30 or 90 days.
Many links elsewhere in Heatwave open this page already filtered, for example Watch these sessions on an alert, or Watch recordings of this page on a heatmap.
Watching a recording
The recording page is titled with the most serious thing that happened. Below the title you’ll see the result, device, number of pages, length and time.
- The player skips over periods where nothing happens. Coloured markers on its timeline show behaviour patterns and cart steps.
- Timeline tells the story of the visit: what happened, in order, with an explanation for each moment. Click a moment to jump there in the replay. Moments on pages that weren’t recorded are marked Not recorded.
- Cart and checkout lists add to cart, checkout and purchase moments. Click one to jump to it.
- Recorded pages lists the pages in the recording.
Use Previous and Next to move through the visits in your filtered list without going back.
Masking
These are always hidden in recordings:
- Everything typed into any field, and hidden form values
- Email addresses and phone numbers anywhere on the page
- Address and account areas
- Embedded frames, for example payment or chat widgets
- Any extra elements you list in Settings > Privacy > Extra elements to hide in recordings. They show as grey boxes.
The page address is saved without query strings or access tokens. See Privacy and consent for more.
Which visits are recorded
- Only visits from shoppers who allowed analytics are tracked at all.
- Of those, a share is recorded. The share depends on your plan’s monthly recording allowance and your choice in Settings. Settings shows the share being recorded right now.
- A visit is either recorded as a whole or not at all.
- Never recorded: customer account pages (login, orders, addresses), pages you exclude in Settings, and Shopify checkout. Checkout steps can still appear under Cart and checkout, because Shopify reports them separately.
Recordings appear a few seconds after a consenting shopper browses your store. They’re kept for as long as your plan keeps data. See Plans and billing.