# Sessions and replays

> Explore individual visits page by page, record sessions for replay, and keep private data out of recordings.

Reports show trends; sessions show what happened in one visit. Use them to understand a number, such as why a page's visitors leave, or to check that a rule behaves as you meant.

## Sessions Explorer

**Sessions Explorer** lists individual visits. Filter them to the ones you care about, then open one to see what it did, page by page: where it came from, which pages it viewed, the events it sent, and the goals it completed.

## Session replay

Session replay records what visitors see and do — scrolling, clicks, form interactions, page changes — and plays it back like a video. It's included on plans with session replay; the pricing page lists which.

A replay shows one visit. To see how everyone used the page on screen, select **Heatmap** in the player to open its [heatmap](https://geoengage.app/docs/analytics/heatmaps).

Recording follows the visitor. It pauses once their tab has been in the background for 30 seconds, or once they've done nothing on the page for 5 minutes, and picks up again when they come back.

### Turning it on

Open **Tracking Config → Recording**:

- Switch recording on for the site.
- **Sampling Rate** records that percentage of visits. Lower it on busy sites.
- **Canvas Recording** also records `<canvas>` elements. Leave it off unless you need it.

Or record only the visits a rule targets, with the rule's **Start Recording** [action](https://geoengage.app/docs/rules/actions#other-actions).

Recordings are kept for 60 days.

### Privacy

Replay is built to leave out what visitors type and anything you mark as private:

- Everything typed into form fields is masked.
- Text in elements with the `sensitive` class or a `data-mask` or `data-private` attribute is masked.
- Elements with the `private` class or a `data-block` or `data-no-record` attribute aren't recorded at all.

```html
<p class="account-balance" data-private>€12,480.00</p>
<div data-no-record>…a third-party payment form…</div>
```

Add your own selectors under **Mask Selectors** and **Block Selectors**. They're added to the ones above, which always apply.

In [consent mode](https://geoengage.app/docs/widget/consent), nothing is recorded until the visitor accepts.

### Keeping pages fast

Recording never needs setup to stay light. The recorder watches its own cost and steps back on its own:

- **Animations** such as carousels, tickers and moving map markers are recorded a few times a second rather than on every frame. They look a little choppier in the replay; the visitor's page stays smooth.
- **A page that changes too much at once**, such as a huge list redrawing, pauses recording until the visitor reaches another page.
- **An embedded frame too large to record** shows empty in the replay; the rest of the page is recorded as usual.
- **A browser that can't send the recording**, for example because an ad blocker blocks it, holds at most a few megabytes of it. Once that's full, recording pauses until the connection is back or the visitor reaches another page.

When any of these happens, the replay shows a note at that point in the timeline.

If part of a recording never reaches us, for example because a visitor lost their connection for good, the timeline marks the spot too, and the replay picks up at the page's next full view.

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Source: https://geoengage.app/docs/analytics/sessions