How do I use the Sessions tab in Session Recording?

In this help, we’ll discuss how to use the Sessions tab to:

• Set regional privacy settings
• Set page privacy
• Set element privacy rules
• Use session filtering

Set privacy settings 

Due to privacy concerns, countries over the globe are adapting legal restrictions on how personal data of end users may be collected and processed. (GDPR legislation in the EU being the most prominently known example of this. ) UXtweak’s privacy settings and consent form are designed to help you adjust which personal data you want to collect if any at all, and to comply with the local legal regulations when doing so.

You can uncheck any of the following option to stop specific types of personal data from being collected:

• store IP address
• record form inputs
• identify users via API
• record on-page email addresses
• record on-page numeric values

While recording any personal information, you can toggle the Explicit consent bar on and off. In the EU, user consent for recording personal data is required. We strongly recommend against collecting personal data without explicit user consent and you will bear full legal responsibility for doing so.

Regional recording policies

You can set different session recording policies for respondents from within and from outside of the EU. Tick/untick any of these options to determine which personal data is going be recorded in which countries. Toggle the consent bar to make UXtweak ask users whether they agree with their personal data being processed.

The UXtweak consent bar

This is what our consent bar looks like. By clicking the Yes I agree button, the user gives UXtweak a permission to collect their personal data. The sort of personal data that is going to be collected is listed above the buttons. This list is generated automicatically, based on which personal data collection options you’ve enabled. The consent bar will keep appearing to the user until they’ve clicked either Yes or No.

Set page privacy 

• Session Recording records on all pages of your website/web app by default.
• Check only record on specified pages and click Define pages to manually set rules for the recorded pages.
• You can set rules for included URLs and excluded URLs. For a page to be recorded it has to be fit at least one of the rules for being included and not fit any of the rules for being excluded.
• Click Add to add more rules.
• Use the URL validator below to verify whether a page URL will be recorded under the current conditions or not.

There are severals ways in which a URL can be matched:

• Simple URL match – ignores the query and hash
• Exact URL match
• URL starts with
• URL ends with
• URL contains
• URL regular expression

Page privacy

By copy and pasting a page URL into included pages, you will limit recording only to that specific page and any other pages that you also add there. Adding a page into excluded pages will make sure that that page will not be recorded. You can test if a page is going to be recorded or not by pasting its URL into the URL match validator.

Set element privacy rules 

• Below regional privacy settings, click Advanced rules.
• Here, you can define privacy rules for specific elements on your website by specifying their CSS selector.
• Included elements override regional privacy settings and can allow for information that is generally not recorded (such as form inputs, email addresses or numbers) to be recorded in any element that matches the specified CSS selector.
• Excluded elements can be used to disable recording of specific elements on your website. There are three options for excluding an element. Ignore events displays the element in recordings but disables recording of events such as typing and mouse clicks. Grey Box replaces the element in recordings with and empty grey box. Mask replaces all text within the element with asterisks (*).
• Enter the css selector that should not be recorded (tags, ids, classes and attributes are all valid).
• Write a note to label the element privacy rule with. Write a note that will make it easier to understand the selectors when revisiting them at later date.
• Click Add element to add the selector as a new element privacy rule.
• Rules that prevent recording of payment details, password inputs and hidden inputs are present by default and (reasonably) cannot be disabled.
• Enable Record this element with user consent to only exclude the element until the user has given their consent for recording form inputs.

Advanced privacy options

An excluded element like this will make sure that the element with this CSS selector will only appear in recordings as a grey box, unless the respondent gave their explicit consent with the recording of their personal information.

Use session filtering 

• In some cases, knowing about trivial sessions might not be interesting to you. Trivial sessions are those that either last very short or lack any significant user activity such as clicks and scrolling. UXtweak allows you to filter these sessions out during recording, so they don’t use up your session quota.
• All sessions are recorded at first (after all, all sessions begin with zero time and zero events at first). It’s only after they end without meeting the expected recording criteria that they are discarded.
• Use the Store only sessions with length more than option to only store those sessions, where users spent a significant amount of time on your website.
• Sometimes, even long sessions can be trivial (e.g. the user opens a page in a tab and then leaves the tab open without doing anything of note). Select Store only sessions containing click & scroll activity to discard sessions with zero activity.
• A high number of sessions that are short or without much activity can be a symptom of usability issues (e.g. when the user opens a page and is so overwhelmed, they don’t know what to do). By using session filtering to filter out trivial sessions, you will become unable to learn about anything but the more complex sessions, so keep that in mind.

Discard trivial sessions

In case you’re interested only in more complex sessions, UXtweak gives you the option to discard sessions that are too short or have little interaction. These sessions will not be counted into your plan quota.