Visitor Replays FAQs
Why do duplicated page elements show up in the recordings?
The Visitors Replays app doesn't work as a screen recorder. It saves the whole structure of the page and then sends it to our servers, together with the mouse movement trail, click locations, and the text being typed.
Sometimes, you might see duplicated elements in the recordings, such as in the screenshot below. This usually happens when the original HTML structure of the page is corrupted but is still rebuilt in the player. This can't be replicated identically.
The good news is that your actual store doesn't look like this, and your visitors will never see it this way.
When will my credits be refilled?
All Vitals merchants get 5,000 pageviews recorded per month, all stored for 30 days. You can upgrade both the number of page views and the storage period by purchasing an addon.
When you run out of credits, the credits will be refilled on the day of your Vitals subscription anniversary. Say your Vitals free trial ends on August 1st, the first subscription cycle starts on the 1st and ends on August 31st. The second subscription cycle starts on August 31st also. This means you will have your Visitor Replays credits refilled on August 31st.
If you upgrade the number of page views or the storage, the subscription cycle of the app changes, and the refill date will change.
Finding your subscription cycle start time and end time can be done by accessing your invoices in the Shopify admin billing section.
Why are there fewer store visits in the Visitor Replays app compared to other sources?
The Visitor Replays has an active web bot/crawler checker and filter. Being a 3rd party app, Vitals doesn't directly detect store visits as bots/crawlers do. So what we can do with the limited access and functionality we are allowed by Shopify is to detect and analyze the activity of each visit and filter out activities that are most likely bot behaviours. For example, a page opening with no mouse or keyboard activity and leaving in under 10 seconds can result from a bot.
The filter/checker is put in place so that these bot/crawler visits do not eat up your monthly page views allocation.
Why videos and some content is displayed as a black box (or white box)?
Videos are usually displayed in iframes. This means that Youtube, Vimeo or other video players will not be loaded in the Visitor Replays recordings.
Other 3rd party content may also be displayed in iframes. Due to the structure of the iframe, they cannot be rendered in a recording. This includes, but not limited to:
- chat windows
- video players
- payment pages
- third party forms
- third party web-apps
Is it possible to exclude specific elements on my store to be seen inside the Visitor Replays app?
Since the Visitor Replays app captures all elements in the store's HTML structure by default, it will also capture elements that may infringe customer privacy (like email address fields, for example).
if you are familiar with identifying CSS selectors on your store to get a name of a specific element, you can have the Visitor Replays app exclude those identified CSS selectors from being recorded by placing them inside the app's settings:
