Recording and Sampling

How does Browsee decide which sessions to record

Does Browsee record all the sessions on my site?

No, depending on the pricing plan that you have chosen, Browsee automatically sets a sampling rate at which to record your sessions.

This means when a session starts, Browsee decides whether or not to record that session based on the sampling rate, and if the prediction suggests that it should record, it starts recording the session.

Let's take an example,

Let's say you have chosen a plan which gives you 10,000 sessions a month. However, your monthly traffic is about 20,000 sessions.

If Browsee did not use random sampling of sessions, your site would run out of 10K sessions approximately halfway during the month. However, Browsee allows you to continuously record around 50% of the sessions everyday so that you never run out of your quota. These 50% sessions are chosen randomly at the start of each session.

Note: Sampling of sessions is only available in the paid plans. In the free plan, there is no sampling of sessions and Browsee may stop recordings once the free tier quota is completed. More.

My traffic is within my quota but my sampling rate is not 100%?

Even if your site's traffic falls within your quota, we may not record all sessions. Apart from the sampling, Browsee also does not record

• Sessions of users who have Do Not Track (DNT) browser setting enabled to protect the user's privacy.

• Sessions of blacklisted IP addresses (configured in your settings).

• Sessions < 3 sessions. This is to avoid recording sessions which have any meaningful learnings. (You may turn off this setting from the Recordings tab in your Account Settings.)

We may also not record sessions where

• Users do not interact with the site. We do this to conserve resources as these sessions just show a page loading and offer no user experience learning.

• Sessions that could not capture sufficient page dom to create a recording. This can happen if the user leaves before Browsee is able to start recording the page.

When the sessions are not recorded, Browsee keeps the session information

Do all plans allow random sampling?

Our free trial plan entails all the features of our Pro plan. However, continuous recording and random sampling of sessions are only applicable to paid plans.

In our free plan, we record all your sessions up to the free limit and halt recordings thereafter until the new quota is released at the start of a new month. You can reactivate recordings by either choosing a paid plan or at the start of a new month.

This is done to ensure fair usage and prioritizing our infrastructure to those actively using our recordings.

Have does Browsee decide which sessions to record?

So in the above example, Browsee decided to set the random sampling rate at 50%. How did it decide that it should be 50% and not 25% or 75% ?

Browsee uses a predictive model that predicts how much traffic you are likely to get on a day. This takes the previous day's traffic, day of the week from the past to predict this rate. This is why it auto-adjusts itself depending on the rise and fall of your seasonal traffic.

Can I modify this sampling rate?

Yes, you can prioritize and deprioritize recordings to control the sampling rate.

You can learn more about how you can do that from your settings here.

Do recordings from override rules count towards my recorded sessions?

Yes, they do. Each time you use this override, you are effectively using up a session from your recordings quota.

Did we answer your questions or do you have a suggestion or alternative requirement? Please write to [e-mail] and we will be happy to address them.