Session replays

Watch anonymous recordings of real visits to your website, page by page, with everything typed into a form hidden.

A session replay plays back a visit to a page of your website: what the visitor saw, and where they moved, clicked and scrolled. Replays live on the Visitors tab of Ads → Analytics, inside each visitor's visits, and come with every plan. The same recordings power heatmaps.

Replays are as anonymous as the rest of the Visitors page: you see the visit, never who made it, and a replay never links to a lead or a patient.

Watch a replay

Open Ads → Analytics, click the Visitors tab and click a visitor.

In their visits, a page with a recording has a play button at the end of its row. Click it.

The replay opens on that page and starts playing. The visit's other recordings are listed underneath, in order, each with its own page: the next one starts when one ends, and Previous and Next move between them.

Under the replay:

Play and Pause, with the time played and the visit's length;
the progress bar: click or drag it, or use the arrow keys, to jump. Marks along it show clicks and page changes;
1×, 2× and 4× speed;
Skip idle time, on by default, which jumps over stretches where nothing happened.

Who is recorded

Recording follows the same consent rule as the Visitors page: a visit is recorded only when the visitor's browser stores the Smileline visitor ID under your Visitor id and consent setting (see Privacy and consent).

Under Store the visitor id immediately, every visitor is recorded unless they refuse analytics, on your cookie banner or through your own code.
Under Wait for a consent-mode / TCF grant or Always wait for consent, a visitor is recorded only once analytics storage is granted. A grant for advertising alone isn't enough.
A browser sending the Global Privacy Control signal is never recorded, and neither are known crawlers.
Recording needs a browser that can compress data itself (the CompressionStream feature of current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari). An older browser isn't recorded, and its page views still count.

Only pages of your own website are recorded. Smileline's own pages never are: the hosted forms, the online booking page and anything else served from a Smileline address.

What is never recorded

Anything typed or chosen in a form. Every form control is masked before the recording leaves the visitor's browser: text boxes and text areas, drop-down lists, checkboxes, radio buttons and sliders, and any editable area of a page (contenteditable) with everything inside it. A replay shows that a field is there, never what was entered in it or whether a box was ticked.
Anything you mark as private. Add the data-clarity-mask="true" attribute to an element of your website to mask it and everything inside it, for example a block that shows a visitor's name after they log in.
The opposite attribute, data-clarity-unmask, is ignored: nothing on your website can switch masking off.
Query strings and fragments. Only the page's path is kept; query strings and fragments are removed before upload, also where the page repeats its own address in links, form addresses and canonical or og:url tags. If a page shows text taken from its address, for example "Thanks, john@…", add data-clarity-mask="true" to that element.

Replays that can't be played

Very short visits. A recording is uploaded every 5 seconds, so a visit to a page shorter than about 5 seconds may have no replay. Its clicks and scrolling still count in heatmaps.
Incomplete recordings. A replay starts from the first snapshot of the page. If that never arrived, for example because the connection dropped as the page opened, the replay says This recording is incomplete. It still counts in heatmaps.
Recordings too large to play. A very long or very busy visit can be too large to play in your browser, and says so. It is kept, and still counts in heatmaps.

Switch recording on or off

Heatmaps and session recordings are on for every website by default. To switch them off, go to Settings → Website → Tracking and turn off Heatmaps and session recordings. Only owners and managers can.

Pages opened after that aren't recorded (configuration changes reach installed scripts within about a minute). A page that was already open can keep sending for up to an hour, and whatever arrives after you switched recording off is discarded rather than kept. Switching off doesn't delete recordings already made: they are deleted on the usual schedule below.

How long recordings are kept

Recordings are stored in your practice's region and kept for 13 months, then deleted. A visit drops out of heatmaps and replays once it is 13 months old.
Erasing a patient also deletes the recordings made under their visitor ID, and new recordings under that ID are refused for 13 months.
Each website can upload up to 2 GB of recordings a day. That is far above what real visitors produce and exists to stop abuse: past it, recording pauses until midnight UTC. Page views, form submissions and calls are never affected.