So that we can provide you with the most complete picture of your digital experience possible, we recommend capturing 100% of user sessions across every area of your website. This helps ensure that you're capturing the entire customer experience, or full story, if you will.
However, if you'd like to explore options for restricting which user sessions are captured by Fullstory, we'll discuss a few options for doing so at the end of this help article. Before we do, let’s first discuss some of the downsides of taking a sampling approach when it comes to understanding your digital experience.
Incomplete and unreliable data
The most obvious downside of sampling is that analytics data becomes unreliable. Sure, you could gain some value from high-level reporting, but once you need to drill down to truly understand a specific issue, sampling can (quite literally) poke holes in your reporting. For example, if you are capturing data at a 20% rate, but a bug is only impacting a cohort of users on a specific browser, you may not have enough data to quickly identify the trend.
The value of session replay diminishes
It will often be the session you really need to see that wasn’t captured if you are taking a sampling approach. Digging into logs to report a bug is cumbersome and doesn’t exactly give you an empathetic understanding of the issue your users experienced. Session replay can show you exactly what happened so your engineering team can reproduce issues reliably. If you ever find yourself in the unfortunate situation of a legal or compliance issue, you'll really wish you had all of the relevant sessions as evidence during litigation.
Inconsistent support experiences
Sampling limits the ability to dive into customer support tickets by user session, or use Go Live. Session replay gives support teams the real-time ability to troubleshoot with your users and quickly reproduce issues without having to ask for screenshots or reproduction steps from them. When you are not capturing 100% of your sessions, your support team will only be able to provide this level of empathy and quick resolution to your users when a session is available. This can not only cause inconsistencies in your customer experience, but an increased first response time, resolution time, and greater customer effort.
Solutions for Limiting Session Capture
If you're looking at ways to limit the number of sessions you capture, Fullstory provides a few options that help you restrict data capture with a wide brush:
- Block data by domain, geography, IP address, or user agent.
- Utilize Split Processing (available on an Enterprise plan with the Data Direct add-on) which allows you to retain a percentage of sessions within Fullstory while sending 100% of your session data to your data warehouse.
- Utilize capture on startup and the restart API or recordOnStart for mobile app sessions to systematically start data capture when certain conditions are met.
- For customers deploying Fullstory through Google Tag Manager (GTM), modify your firing rules in GTM.
- Manually stop/start data capture at any time via Settings > Data Capture and Privacy > Data Capture for web sessions or Settings > Data Capture and Privacy > Mobile Data Capture for mobile app sessions.
Please note, if you do decide to implement your own custom sampling logic, Fullstory Support will not be able to assist with any issues you may encounter with said logic. Sampling can prohibit us from capturing sessions to troubleshoot session capture or playback issues and is often the culprit for data discrepancies between Fullstory and other analytics tools. We may need you to remove your sampling logic temporarily to assist with any related issues.
Not seeing any solutions that fit your current needs?
Let us know by logging into your Fullstory account and clicking on the hand icon near the top right of your screen to submit product feedback straight to our Product team. We'd love to hear from you!