A funnel report can tell you that 62% of visitors who reach your cart page never reach checkout. It cannot tell you why. That gap is where most CRO budgets get wasted — teams redesign the cart page based on a guess, run the test, and find no meaningful change.
Watching, not just measuring
Session recordings close that gap. Watching real customers move through your cart page — where their cursor hesitates, what they scroll back to check, where a rage click gives away frustration — turns a statistic into a specific, fixable problem.
We've found genuine causes ranging from a shipping cost that only appears after a customer clicks through, to a discount code field that silently failed on certain browsers, to a delivery estimate customers didn't trust because it looked auto-generated.
Why we use both
Analytics tells you where to look. Recordings tell you what you're looking at. Used alone, analytics produces confident-sounding but ungrounded hypotheses. Recordings alone can overweight a handful of vivid but unrepresentative sessions.
Together, they let us prioritise fixes with a specific mechanism behind them — not a plausible story that happens to fit the data.