This article covers how to get started with Fullstory, including steps to check your privacy settings, install your snippet, and hit play for the first time.
The magic of Fullstory starts the first time you hit play and see a real customer's experience in pixel-perfect playback.
Once you have selected your initial privacy configurations, the key to unlocking the magic and getting to your first playback is installing your Fullstory data capture snippet (a bit of JavaScript) in the <head> of your site or web application.
Here are the steps you'll want to take to get up-and-running:
- Check your privacy settings and customize exclusions
- Install your data capture snippet
- Click play to watch your first session
Check your privacy settings and customize exclusions
Privacy is a priority. Take a moment to consider, "Are there any parts of my website, online store, or web application that capture sensitive or personal data?"
Exclude Sensitive Personal Data
Some data is sensitive personal data that you would never want to send to Fullstory.
For example: passwords for sign-up forms or credit card details for a purchase should always be private.
Use Excluded Elements to make sure that sensitive data doesn't get captured at all. First, review Fullstory's default exclusions carefully. Then, customize them as needed to match your website's HTML and CSS naming conventions for sensitive fields.
Capture Personal Data with Consent
Some personal data isn't sensitive, and you might want to capture and send that personal data to Fullstory with a customer's permission.
For example: your customer may consent to let you capture their personal name or user ID so that you can identify their sessions and provide more proactive customer support.
Use FS.consent to ensure that Fullstory only captures personal data when your customers have given permission.
Once you've customized your settings to ensure that all sensitive personal data fields are blocked and that all personal data is handled with consent, Fullstory will capture everything else — all the customer experience data on sites where the snippet is installed — without any further special instrumentation.
Privacy settings all buttoned up? Nice work! Gold star. Proceed to the next step.
Install your data capture snippet
Your Fullstory account comes with a unique JavaScript snippet that you'll need to place in the <head> of your website, online store, or web application in order to begin capturing interactions.
You can copy / paste the snippet into the <head> element via your Content Management System (CMS), via your online store platform, or via your application's code. Or, if you use Google Tag Manager or Segment, you can install Fullstory through a tag manager integration.
A couple of comments about the data capture script:
- It's super small, asynchronous, and designed to be unnoticeable to any user of your technology. You can read more about the negligible performance impact of Fullstory in this article.
- No need to instrument any elements in your application or site – once the Fullstory script loads, it captures all in-browser interactions and mutations, so don't fret about how to capture that pesky "submit" button – if it's on the page or screen, we see it, capture it, and make it available to search.
Install Fullstory with NPM
Built a single page app using React, Angular, Vue, or a different thick-client framework? You can install Fullstory using NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@fullstory/browser
Go learn about how to install the Fullstory snippet and complete your setup.
Click play to watch your first session
Once you've got your Fullstory snippet installed, you will start to see active visitor sessions show up in your 'Everyone' segment as new visitors interact on your site.
Want to quickly test and make sure it's working? Open up your site in your own browser, click around on a few things, and then navigate away from your site in your browser. You should see your own visitor session show up in your 'Everyone' segment.
The green “Online” icon indicates that the user may still be online and the session is still being captured. The blue icon with the date and time indicates the session is complete (we close sessions after 30 minutes of inactivity).
| Session capture still in progress | Session capture complete |
Once you've clicked on a session, the icon will no longer be filled in with color, indicating that it has already been watched. The watched indicator is at a user level, so your teammates will not see a session marked as watched if they haven't watched it using their own login.
With your privacy settings buttoned up and sessions being captured, you're prepared to go where your imagination has already been.
Ready to unlock the magic of search and playback? Move ahead to "You've got sessions - now what?"