CloseTrace
Get a demo

Glossary

Every term in session replay
and lead recovery — defined.

One canonical place for the language used across our product, our blog and the wider analytics industry. Every entry leads with a one-sentence answer so you can scan, then dives deeper if you need it.

Categories:Form analyticsFunnelsHeatmaps & visualizationOpen sourcePrivacy & complianceSession replayUser behavior

User behavior

Bounce rate vs exit rate

Bounce rate and exit rate both measure visitors leaving a site, but bounce rate counts single-page sessions that started and ended on the same page, while exit rate counts the share of all sessions on a given page that left from that page. Every bounce is an exit, but not every exit is a bounce.

5 min read→

User behavior

Dead click

A dead click is a click on something that looks interactive — a styled div, an icon, a label, a disabled button — but produces no observable response: no DOM mutation, no navigation, no network request within roughly 1.5 seconds. It is the single clearest signal that an interface is misleading users.

4 min read→

User behavior

Exit intent

Exit intent is a behavioral signal that a visitor is about to leave the page, traditionally detected on desktop by tracking cursor velocity moving toward the top of the viewport and on mobile by tab-blur and visibility-change events. It is the trigger behind most last-chance popups, and its desktop accuracy has decayed sharply since 2020.

4 min read→

Form analytics

Form abandonment rate

Form abandonment rate is the percentage of visitors who start filling out a form but never submit it, calculated as (forms started − forms submitted) / forms started × 100. A form is considered started the moment the visitor focuses any field, and benchmark studies place the cross-industry average between 67 and 81 percent.

4 min read→

Funnels

Funnel analysis

Funnel analysis is the practice of plotting the percentage of users who complete each step of a defined multi-step conversion sequence, from a starting event to a goal event, in order to find the steps where users drop off. It is the workhorse method for diagnosing leaks in signup, checkout, onboarding and activation flows.

5 min read→

Funnels

Funnel drop-off rate

Funnel drop-off rate is the percentage of users who exit a multi-step conversion flow at a specific step instead of advancing to the next one, calculated as users who left that step divided by users who entered it. It is the inverse of step conversion rate and the most direct way to find where a funnel leaks.

4 min read→

Heatmaps & visualization

Heatmap

A heatmap is an aggregated visualization of user interaction data — clicks, mouse movements, scrolls, or attention — overlaid on a screenshot of a web page using a color gradient from cool to hot. It compresses thousands of individual sessions into a single image that shows where attention concentrates and where it drops off.

4 min read→

Privacy & compliance

PII masking

PII masking is the practice of replacing personal identifiers such as names, emails, phone numbers and credit cards with placeholders before the data ever leaves the visitor's browser. In session replay and analytics tools, masking is the primary control that keeps recordings compliant with GDPR, CCPA and PCI-DSS.

4 min read→

User behavior

Rage click

A rage click is a frustration signal where a visitor clicks the same element three or more times within roughly one to two seconds, usually because the interface failed to respond, a handler is broken, or the affordance is misleading. It is one of the strongest leading indicators of UX friction in product analytics.

4 min read→

Open source

rrweb

rrweb (record and replay the web) is an open-source MIT-licensed JavaScript library that records DOM mutations, user inputs, and network metadata as a serialized event stream and replays them inside a sandboxed iframe. Created by Yuyz0112, it powers the session replay features of PostHog, Sentry, OpenReplay, Highlight, and CloseTrace.

4 min read→

User behavior

Scroll depth tracking

Scroll depth tracking measures how far down a page a visitor scrolls, usually bucketed at 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the rendered page height. It is the simplest signal to tell whether visitors are reading your long-form content or bouncing right after the hero section loads.

4 min read→

Session replay

Session replay

Session replay is a technique that reconstructs a website visitor's browsing session by recording DOM mutations, inputs, and network events as a serialized event stream — then replays them inside a sandboxed iframe. It is not a video recording, which keeps payloads much smaller than equivalent screen video.

3 min read→