Brief Overview

Session Playback is an advanced data collection level in WalkMe Insights that allows you to view accurate recreations of real user sessions. It captures detailed interaction and visual data to replay how users experienced your application.

Session Playback builds on Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) and provides the most detailed level of visibility available in WalkMe Insights.

Use Cases

Use Session Playback to:

• Understand how users interact with your site and where they encounter friction
• Identify why users drop off in funnels or guided flows
• Validate behavior patterns observed in Digital Experience Analytics (DXA)
• Support QA, troubleshooting, and issue reproduction
• Provide Support teams with visual context to improve investigation and resolution

Session Playback is typically used to complement analytics data with visual insight, rather than as a primary analytics tool.

Data Collected by Session Playback

Session Playback includes all data collected by Engagement Analytics and Digital Experience Analytics (DXA), along with additional interaction-level data required to recreate user sessions.

Additional interaction and visual data

• Mouse position and movement
• Page HTML snapshots and DOM changes
• Input field interactions (when explicitly configured)
• Focus in and out of fields
• Changes to visible elements
• Page scrolling
• Text selection
• Media playback
• Page size and window resizing events

Assets and rendering

Captured assets are cached to ensure sessions remain viewable even if your site content changes.

Session Playback can accurately recreate:

• HTML and CSS, including animations and hover effects
• Vector graphics (SVG) and animations
• Embedded iframes
• Script-modified input values
• AJAX URL navigation
• HTML5 audio and video playback
• Multi-touch events on supported devices

Data Retention

Session Playback data is retained for one year by default according to WalkMe's standard retention policy.

Privacy and Data Controls

Session Playback settings let you control which sessions are recorded and how recording is triggered.

You can manage:

• Excluded IP addresses or ranges
• Excluded domains or subdomains
• Recording method

Session Playback Settings

Enable Session Playback

Enablement

Session Playback must be enabled for the system to start collecting session replay data.

Once enabled, you can turn on Session Playback from the WalkMe Admin Center by configuring the Data Collection Level settings.

Data Collection Level Settings

Required permissions

To enable Session Playback and view recordings, users must have the appropriate roles and permissions in WalkMe.

Roles & Permissions

Segments

By default all users have session playback disabled. They must select a segment to activate Session Playback in the Admin Center.

Session Playback Settings

Technical Notes

Browser and platform support

Session Playback supports the following browsers:

• Chrome
• Edge
• Firefox
• Safari (version 8 and later)

Session Playback does not currently support mobile.

Analytics events may still be collected from unsupported browsers, but session replays are available only for the browsers listed above.

Storage and security

• Session data is encrypted and stored securely on Amazon AWS

WalkMe Insights tracks user activity only on websites where WalkMe is installed. You can use Traffic Management settings to exclude specific user groups or environments from data collection.

Session Playback quota

• Recording stops once the defined Session Playback quota is reached
• In some cases, a small number of additional sessions may be captured after the quota limit
• Updating the quota resets the count, and the update date becomes the new starting point
• The quota automatically resets each month on the same date it was activated

Activity log

WalkMe provides an audit trail for all data access within Session Playback. This ensures your organization maintains a secure record of who accessed specific recordings and when.

Logged actions

Every time a user interacts with a Session Playback recording, an event is captured. The following actions are tracked:

• View: A user opened a session recording

• Delete: A user deleted a session recording

• Export: A user exported a session recording

How admins can access the log

To view these events, navigate to the Activity Log in the Admin Center.

Activity Log