FullStory

For any project that anyone creates these days (myself included) you want to see how many visitors your site gets, where they come from, what they clicked etc. The easiest and cheapest way to do this is obviously Google Analytics I think that 99% of websites out there have Google Analytics embedded into their code.

I am no different, I wanted to see how the users were getting to my site, what they clicked, how long they were on there for etc. etc. So I added Google Analytics to my site too... Which was really cool and free, but the longer I used Google Analytics I felt that I wanted more insight. Like what if I could actually see how users interacted with my site.

I came across FullStory and this is exactly what I wanted, it will record all your user sessions and you get to replay them in full. So you can see exactly how a user uses your site, what they click, and see if your site might benefit from some A/B tests or changes. - I am on the free plan, so it doesn't need to cost you a fortune.

Both Google Analytics and FullStory allow you to login with your G Suite account which helps you keep your accounts all linked.

With FullStory and Google Analytics I feel that I have the perfect insight into how the users are using my site, and all the analytics around how they get there. Its a perfect combo

We chose Webflow to build up websites faster and to make possible for particular employees to fix some misspellings or add an easy element to the page on their own - it is like Adobe Photoshop. To work with the incoming traffic we use our own product, that I can't pin here. It helps to make nurture visitors from the first session into the signing up and further activation into the product. In addition to @Carrrot we use Google Analytics to traffic source awareness, to monitor customers inside the product FullStory helps is a lot with its fury clicking and abandoned links. Activation and retention are done by our own product through the pop-ups, live chat, and emails that all based on customer behavior.

At StackShare we wanted to better understand how are users were interacting with the products that we were building. We decided to use FullStory to record our users' sessions to see the real user experiences that were occurring. This helped us to debug a multitude of front end exceptions that were difficult to find and reproduce. Additionally because we were already using Segment, integrating FullStory was as simple as clicking a button.

One of the challenges we've had to deal with as our product surface area has grown, is identifying and reproducing bugs. We use Sentry for exception monitoring, however, it's usually difficult to try to reproduce bugs. I first heard about FullStory from our friends over at Flexport (check out the Stack Story and you'll hear them mention it: https://stackshare.io/posts/how-flexport-builds-software-to-move-over-1-billion-dollars-in-merchandise). FullStory let's you record user sessions, and play them back to help you identify bugs and UX issues. You're even able to view the console errors live as they happen during the sessions!

We were pretty blown away at how comprehensive the product was at first, and it seems to be getting better every time I use it. Only complaint is that it's super expensive once you're in the hundreds of thousands of sessions so we had to stop trying to record logged out sessions, we only use it for auth'd sessions. We also started out using it via Segment but once we needed to watch out for the number of sessions we were recording we realized that it was impossible to restrict FullStory recordings on a per-page basis without ripping it out of Segment, so we ended up just using their JS snippet and putting that in the Rails views that we wanted to monitor closely.

The ability to share specific portions of sessions, speed them up, skip inactivity, and all sorts of other little features all add up to a really solid product that helps both our PMs and engineers improve our own product much quicker. I officially requested a Sentry + FullStory integration a while back https://twitter.com/yonasbe/status/871987738777616384, still waiting on this! #UserFeedbackAsAService #reproducing-bugs #sessionrecording #bug-squashing

Our UX designers swear by this tool, that gives us valuable information on how our users interact with the app. Thanks to FullStory, we've implemented A/B testing that helps us to fine-tune and polish our interfaces to perfection. FullStory