What to ask your agency about session recordings

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on session recordings, these questions are worth asking early.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Ten recordings will teach you something surprising. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Watch the sessions that failed, not the happy paths. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

How to tell if yours is fine

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Three things worth confirming about session recordings before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Ten recordings will teach you something surprising — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.