Brief Overview

Session Playback gives you a visual way to understand how users interact with your website. It recreates real user sessions within WalkMe Insights, so you can see the journey users take—click by click and scroll by scroll.

These recreations are not video recordings. Instead, they are highly accurate simulations generated from browser-level data, enabling you to analyze behavior, troubleshoot issues, and identify opportunities to improve the digital experience.

Session Playback

Use Cases

Use Session Playback to:

• See how users navigate your site and where they encounter friction
• Investigate why users drop off in funnels or flows
• Validate patterns identified in Digital Experience Analytics (DXA)
• Support QA and troubleshooting with visual recreations
• Help Support teams reduce resolution times with contextual insights

How It Works

When Session Playback collection is enabled on your website, Insights begins collecting additional user data on all pages where WalkMe is available and organizes the data into distinct user sessions.

Each session is turned into a highly accurate simulation that can be viewed just like a recording. Session Playback recreates user sessions with near-perfect accuracy because Session Playback Collection captures everything occurring in the web browser's Document Object Model (DOM) and saves copies of all assets that define a page's appearance.

Each session is tagged by:

• WalkMe Event
• Tracked Event
• Analytics properties
• Other filtering mechanisms

These tags allow you to easily filter and jump to relevant sessions wherever needed.

Sessions can also include individual time-stamped notes added to the timeline, allowing collaborators to annotate specific actions or moments.

To improve collaboration, sessions can be shared securely via URL link for review by other team members or departments.

Access

You can access Session Playback in WalkMe Insights.

1. Sign in to Insights
2. From the left menu, select Sessions
3. Choose Playback

Session Playback Page Breakdown

This page displays all your recorded session data and lets you play back user sessions if session recording is active.

1. Filters

• The filter drop-down contains every Saved Filter defined in the Sessions page

• The data shown on every report in this page relates to the chosen filter

2. Date picker

• The data shown on every report in this page relates to the chosen date range

  • The date picker filters on the time the Session was closed (the last event of the session)

  • So some sessions that started in the date picker time range, but ended outside of it, could be missed

3. Filtered session count

• Shows the total count of Session Playbacks captured by the filter you've set in the Filter and Date Picker section

  • This filter will only return sessions that ended in a time that falls in the selected time range

4. Date column

• Shows the date and time (UTC) on which a given session was recorded

  • Shows the time of the first event of the session in UTC time zone

5. Session info column

• Shows the session score, duration, and the number of app pages viewed in the session

6. Session timeline column

• Shows a color-coded, clickable session timeline

• Click the play icon to view a session recording from the beginning, or click the timeline to jump to that location in a session recording

• Hover over the “?” icon to view the session activity key, enabling you to decode the colors on the timeline

• Hover over a colored bar in the timeline to view the different events that occurred within the session

7. User column

• View the username or GUID of the user whose activity the Session Playback is comprised of

• Hover over a username or GUID to see the total number of sessions the user has engaged and date this user was first seen

8. Device column

• Shows the browser type and operating system the user was on during this session

• Hover over a browser-OS icon pair to see the browser resolution, browser version, and the name of the OS

• Starting lib version XXX Resolution is not supported anymore

9. Actions column

• Click the Delete icon to permanently remove a session playback recording from Insights

Session Player

Once you click the Play icon to open an individual session, you are taken to the Session Playback page, where you can explore a detailed, interactive recreation of a user's experience. The view includes information about the user, actions, device, and timeline, allowing you to analyze every step of the session.

1. User info

• Displays the user identifier as reported to Insights (for example, user@walkme.com)
• Click the user identifier to view all sessions recorded for that user
• Shows the total number of sessions for the user (for example, “36 of 36 sessions”)
• Displays the session date and a home shortcut to return to the Sessions list
• Clicking on the user identifier will show every session this user has in Insights

2. Share

You can share recorded sessions directly from the Session Playback viewer to collaborate or provide visibility to end users.

To share a session:

1. Go to Session Playback
2. Filter the page by the user's identifier, such as User ID or a known user attribute
3. Click a session in the list to open and review it
4. In the session viewer, click the Share icon
5. Tick Allow public access to generate a shareable URL
6. Copy the link and share it with the relevant stakeholders or end users

3. Session transcript

• Displays the number of page views and total actions in the session and syncs automatically with the timeline during playback
  • Clicks
  • Page views
  • Input changes
  • JavaScript exceptions
  • Custom events
  • WalkMe events

• Each event appears as a transcript tile containing:
  • Icon: Event icon
  • Title: Event name
  • Subtitle: Event summary
  • Information icon (“i”): Additional event details

4. Player controls

• Available controls:

• • Play / pause: Starts or stops playback
  • Activity time counter: Displays total activity time (excluding idle periods)
    • The time in this counter is calculated out of total activity time (total time minus idle time)
    • Live sessions will show the activity tile counter only after the session is closed
  • Session timeline: The timeline is interactive. Click it to rewind or fast forward
    • Every mark on the timeline represents an event from the transcript

5. Play speed

• Adjust how quickly the session playback runs

6. Full screen

• Expand the Session Player to full-screen mode for a larger view

Understand Session Scores

Each session is assigned a score that helps you identify the most relevant recordings to review first.

The session score is calculated using several weighted factors:

• Number of clicks
• Number of URLs visited
• Number of input field interactions
• Length of inactivity
• Session age

The higher the score, the more recent and active the session.

Technical Notes

• Session data is encrypted and stored securely on Amazon AWS
• Sessions are retained for one year by default
• Session Playback is not supported on mobile devices or Shadow DOM frameworks (for example, Salesforce Lightning)
• Publishing new content in Production triggers Session Playback collection for that environment
• To enable playback, ensure Session Playback Collection is activated in your Admin Center
• Only sessions captured after Session Playback Collection was enabled will appear
• The EU Data Center does not currently support Session Playback
• Playbacks are only available for Single Session Funnels and not Total Sessions