Replay it again, Sam: Amplitude’s ‘Session Replay Everywhere’ rocks with analytics visualizations

Imagine you're in a smoky bar on some random city street, swallowed by the night. Inside, it’s barely lit, the dark wood glowing faintly beneath two neon signs as they buzz in the windows. 

One reads “A.” The other flashes a “B.”

Through the haze, a guitar wafts a melancholy melody into the air. A dark figure hovers over the fretboard, crooning some vaguely familiar tune about user behavior and product experience.

Welcome to the fever dream called The Analytics Blues, and it’s sending shivers down the DX spine.

Why such a sad song? Because marketers have been stumbling through this foggy bar, trapped between stats and stories as they try to understand what's really happening around them.

On one hand, quantitative analytics brings real science to the game. We have tools that deliver insights from across the digital experience flow, showing us key metrics around drop-offs, churn rates, and conversions. 

But the data doesn’t always tell us why these events occur. That leaves marketers and analysts to ponder, whip up stories, or sing a few sad songs to explain why users behave the way they do in a product experience.

If you’re a wandering marketer, you’ve probably heard this record on repeat. Let’s say you’ve got a checkout flow that could be performing better, but all you have in the way of analytics are numbers. If there’s a precipitous cart abandonment in your final payment step, you’re left asking, WHY? Is it pricing confusion? Are there problems with a form or some other nefarious UX issue?

A number is just a blank record. But Amplitude is putting some music on this vinyl. Last year, the product and digital analytics company introduced its new Session Replay feature in an effort to close the gap between quantitative insights and qualitative understanding. This allows users to go beyond a funnel to understand the “why” behind the metrics, enabling them to diagnose product issues, improve conversions, identify UX behaviors, innovate faster – and generally build better digital experiences.

Session Replay is some powerful stuff. You can launch it directly from a user’s event stream, inside a chart, or even from your homepage. Replays are generally available for viewing five minutes after a session begins, so it offers some instant gratification. The application is rich with data, displaying things like your session's start time, user ID, session length, country, and more – so you get relevant context.

How successful has Session Replay been? Ask Mathpresso, an Amplitude customer. The company used the tool to identify issues with visitors not scrolling far enough to engage with key features. This resulted in UX enhancements, and in just two months, they reduced customer acquisition costs by 85% and increased sign-ups by a staggering 520%. Not bad.

We’ve been running with a music theme, and there’s a fantastic video on Amplitude’s website for Fender Guitars (queue the crowd cheering). I love this testimonial because it speaks to the impact that experimentation can have on divining the real obstacles in optimizing user experiences. This is where Amplitude is hitting the right notes with marketing teams – and how Session Replays can further enhance its impact. 

Check it out while playing a little air guitar in your office chair:

Until recently, Session Replays weren’t deeply integrated into all parts of the Amplitude platform. Teams could watch replays alongside their analytics, but they still had to manually connect their insights with charts, experiments, and other workflows. 

But now, Amplitude has expanded Session Replays to… well, everywhere. Let’s take a closer look at what this means for users.

A “new way” to do analytics

The benefits of Session Replay are abundantly clear. But as Amplitude identified, having it in the right place at the right time was the missing link to eliminating guesswork and accelerating decision-making. Now, it’s incorporated into every workflow with the aptly named Session Replay Everywhere. 

In a nutshell, that means the tool is seamlessly integrated into analytics, A/B testing, and surveys – so teams can move from insight to action faster. Marketers, for example, need to be incredibly nimble; now, they can see Replays when and where they matter most, along with AI-powered summaries and recommendations. And by combining structured data with actual user experience, brands and teams have a more complete picture than ever before. 

There’s another key aspect to Amplitude’s Session Replay offering, and it’s focused on its unique approach to event-based analytics. Until recently, this class of tools hasn’t provided visual context to users, instead relying on structured event taxonomies with pre-defined tracking (think “button clicks” and that ilk of action). This can all be time-consuming and labor-intensive to set up and maintain. 

Here’s the big payoff: With Amplitude Session Replay, you can capture replays of user engagement with or without these kinds of rigid event taxonomies. More importantly, you can do it with deeper control over your data privacy and security governance. Session Replay Everywhere also embeds its visual replays directly into your analytics, experiments, survey responses, and audience building. And its AI-powered insights help surface the important stuff without having to sift through mountains of results.

Transforming workflows with visual analytics

Let’s go back to that example of a drop-off rate on your payments page. Funnel analysis can show you where it’s happening, but understanding why and being able to improve the experience is nearly impossible if you can’t see what your users are doing before they drop off.

This kind of user context has long been a mystery, like stumbling through that hazy bar. But with Session Replay Everywhere, you can now see what users are doing directly from your funnel chart – all without switching pages or tools. Within the replay, there’s a handy AI-generated summary that details the user drop-offs and highlights trends, sentiment, and recommendations. 

Amplitude also makes your findings actionable. Within its fully integrated platform, you can quickly resolve a problem using a guide, survey, or experiment.

See why users are dropping off by accessing AI-powered summaries directly from your chart. Source: Amplitude website

Make your experiments smarter and monetize more users

We all know the hustle required to convert free users to paying customers. It requires constant experimentation and innovation. But keying in on why users check out – or abandon their carts – is essential to improving checkout conversions and growing revenue.

With Session Replay, you can see why users drop off during checkout directly within your funnel analysis, so you can easily identify what you want to test. Once your experiment is up and running in Amplitude, you can then watch replays directly from your experiment and visualize the end results – empowering you to confidently make improvements that will drive the best results.
 

Session Replay enables you to properly tune your experiments and drive improved results. Source: Amplitude website

Make personalization work – without the guesswork

Personalization continues to be the “Holy Grail” of digital experiences, and with the advent of enhanced generative AI capabilities, the path to value is becoming more pronounced. With the right tools, personalized experiences can pay off big time by improving engagement and lifting conversion rates. 

And therein lies the challenge: This outcome often requires multiple tools to facilitate each dimension of personalization. This includes everything from analytics to audience segmentation, guides to surveys, and more. 

Session Replay changes the game by consolidating the chaos in one place, enabling you to manage and validate your personalization strategy with greater control and ensure that it’s working. Now, with Session Replay Everywhere, you can quickly access replays across Ampltiude’s entire platform, eliminating the gruntwork – and the guesswork – from your experiments, surveys, and audience segments.

Session Replay gives you a more complete picture of user activity before and after a survey. Source: Amplitude website

Pricing and availability

According to Amplitude, Session Replay is now available to all Amplitude customers. The company has also announced a mobile version, which you can learn about here.

Like customer data platforms and other analytic panes of glass, Amplitude relies on MTUs (Monthly Tracked Users) as a foundational metric for pricing. An MTU is a unique user who triggers one or more events within a calendar month. This can be either an anonymous user (which Amplitude tracks with device ID) or an identified user (tracked by user ID). 

Like you, I crave transparency with pricing. Amplitude does an OK job of outlining this within its plans. There’s actually a free starter package that includes up to 10,000 MTUs with a nice array of features – including Session Replay. It’s ideal for individuals or tire-kickers, and a great way to get a sense of the platform experience.

The Plus plan adds real heat to the fretboard, raising the MTUs to 300K and providing unlimited product analytics, feature tagging, and more. While designed for small teams, Plus could pack enough power for a broad range of organizations. This goes for $49/month – a solid price for getting your feet wet or building a strategy.

Finally, Amplitude’s Growth and Enterprise require custom pricing. This makes sense given the volume of MTU transactions required for large organizations looking to scale with personalization via enhanced A/B testing. Enterprise also adds the benefits you would expect at that level, including a dedicated account manager.  

The Verdict

Digital analytics are proving to be more important and strategically beneficial than ever. At the same time, the evolving landscape of data privacy and the advent of AI are impacting its effectiveness across the board. In other words, there are opportunities and challenges ahead. 

Of course, this is true across every facet of the digital landscape. Just as marketers about SEO, which is experiencing a precipitous decline as chatbots and agents change the game. As such, brands are having to find new ways – and new tools – to understand traffic, trends, and user behaviors to drive more conversions.

We started this review by jamming with a music theme, so let’s stick with it. The aforementioned Fender is a storied brand in the guitar industry, and Amplitude is proving you can teach an old hound dog a few new tricks. When the company discovered that 90 percent of new guitar players in their Fender Play program were quitting, they were left asking why – and what to do about it. Thanks to the power of analytics and experimentation, they unlocked the answers. 

Turns out that participants needed to realize success earlier in the process by learning a song or two. And by adjusting the trajectory, they were able to improve Fender Play conversions by 27%. In addition to the lift, this story is a testament to earning and reinforcing loyalty in this precarious digital era. 

Amplitude is built for this kind of bold experimentation, and Session Replay has added real power to these chords. By expanding it across its entire platform, marketers now have it in easy reach, which should effectively reduce the guesswork surrounding metrics and accelerate more impactful innovation.

Tangentially, there’s been a lot of focus and activity around CDPs this year, specifically with recent acquisitions and announcements. As we know, analytics are also key to the value of these tools. As CMS and DXP platforms shore up their data layers to enhance customer 360 capabilities, standalone CDPs are working to redefine their value in an evolving marketplace that’s ruled by large-scale players like Segment. 

Below it all is the growing presence and value of the data warehouse, and Amplitude – like CDP players – has been posturing as a value-added layer of visualization. Its warehouse-native, self-serve offering is built specifically for data warehouse solutions like Snowflake, allowing users to seamlessly access insights and run queries directly in Snowflake or Amplitude.

That said, it will be interesting to see how data warehouses evolve their own analytics tooling in the near future (or acquire them). Even so, platforms like Amplitude offer a richness and maturity that will be difficult to replicate downstream – things like assessment tools and tracking guides that enhance the customer experience. 

If you’re evaluating analytics tools within your stack, I’ve long been a fan of Amplitude’s scope and intuitive UX. It offers pointed solutions around acquisition, retention, and monetization that are purpose-built for a range of applications across multiple use cases (it’s not just marketers, but engineers shipping products). 

Furthermore, Session Replay is a resource that can augment your human intuition around metrics and help you visually discover, validate, and remediate performance issues. Armed with the right user replays – precisely when you need them – you can finally see beyond the limitations of quantitative data. 

In that sense, it’s a must-have song on your digital playlist.

Replay it again, Sam.  

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