Does Google Analytics Have Session Replay?

So, does Google Analytics have a session replay feature? The short answer is no, it doesn't offer true, video-like session replay. However, that’s not the end of the story. Google Analytics 4 is incredibly powerful for understanding what users are doing on your site in aggregate, and it provides tools that give you a log of individual user journeys. This article will clarify what GA4 offers, explain how to use its closest features, and show you how to pair it with other tools to get the full story of your user behavior.

What Exactly is Session Replay?

Before we go any further, let's be clear on what session replay actually is. Think of it as a DVR for your website. Session replay tools record a user's entire interaction - mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, and form fills - and let you play it back like a video. You're not just seeing a list of pages they visited, you're seeing exactly how they navigated those pages.

This is a source of powerful qualitative insight. While standard analytics tell you that 70% of users abandoned their cart on the checkout page, a session replay can show you why. You might watch recordings and discover they are all struggling with a confusing shipping form, or "rage-clicking" on a broken discount code button. This visual context is something raw numbers can't provide.

Basically, it helps you bridge the gap between quantitative data (the "what") and qualitative insights (the "why").

Google Analytics: Masters of the "What"

Google Analytics excels at collecting, segmenting, and reporting on quantitative data. It is the definitive source for answering questions like:

• How many users visited from our recent email campaign?
• Which landing page has the highest bounce rate?
• What is the conversion rate for mobile users versus desktop users?
• What percentage of our audience is located in Canada?

GA4 aggregates data from thousands or even millions of user sessions to give you a high-level view of trends and performance. It organizes this information around events (like page_view, add_to_cart, or purchase) and user attributes (like location or traffic source). This scaled view is essential for understanding business health, but it intentionally anonymizes and groups behavior to spot broad patterns.

Think of it like a retail store's security report. The report might tell you, "1,000 people entered the store today, 300 went to the electronics section, and 50 made a purchase." It gives you the critical numbers, but it doesn't give you the security camera footage to show one person staring confusedly at the TV models for ten minutes before walking out.

GA4's Closest Alternatives: Path & User Exploration

While GA4 doesn't have visual session replays, it has two powerful reports in its "Explore" section that let you analyze individual user journeys on an event-by-event basis. It’s the log, not the video, but it’s still incredibly useful.

1. Path Exploration

The Path Exploration report visualizes the journey users take through your website from one event or page to another. This is great for seeing common user flows and identifying unexpected drop-off points.

For example, you can see the top five pages users visit right after landing on your homepage. Or, you could trace a path backward from a "Thank You" page to see the most common sequences that lead to a successful conversion.

How to Create a Simple Path Exploration Report:

1. On the left-hand navigation, click Explore.
2. Select Path exploration from the template gallery.
3. You'll see a visualization with a "Starting point" or "Ending point" node. Click on it.
4. Choose your node type. You can set a key event like session_start or a specific page.
5. For this example, let's choose Event name and select session_start.
6. The report will generate a tree showing the sequence of events users triggered in Step +1 after their session started. You can see how many users went from session_start to first_visit to page_view, and so on.
7. Keep clicking on nodes in the path to expand the journey further and further.

This report helps answer questions like, "What do users do right before they add an item to their cart?" or "Where do users go when they leave the pricing page without signing up?"

2. User Explorer

The User Explorer report is the closest GA4 gets to an individual session log. It lists activity by an anonymized User ID, allowing you to see every single event a specific person triggered in chronological order across all their sessions.

How to Use the User Explorer Report:

1. Again, navigate to Explore on the left.
2. This time, select User explorer from the template gallery.
3. You'll see a table listing individual "App-instance IDs" along with data like their total events, sessions, and transaction revenue.
4. Click on any one of the App-instance IDs.
5. A detailed timeline will appear on the right, listing every single event triggered by that one user, from session_start to scroll to add_to_cart, all timestamped. You can expand each event to see its parameters (e.g., for a page_view event, you can see the specific page title and URL they viewed).

This view is fantastic for troubleshooting user-specific issues or deeply understanding the behavior of your highest-value customers. You can see exactly how many times a user visited before purchasing or if they repeatedly triggered an error event.

The Best Tools for True Session Replay

If you've identified a problem in Google Analytics and need that video-like feedback to understand the "why," you'll need a dedicated session replay tool. The good news is that most of them integrate seamlessly with GA4. Here are a few of the most popular and respected options:

1. Microsoft Clarity

Best for: Getting started for free.

Clarity is Microsoft's completely free analytics tool, and it's surprisingly robust. It offers session replays, heatmaps (which visually show where users click and scroll most), and insightful dashboards. It automatically identifies "rage clicks" and "dead clicks" to help you quickly find recordings of frustrated users. Its free price point makes it a no-brainer for any business wanting to dip its toes into session replay.

2. Hotjar

Best for: An all-in-one user behavior platform.

Hotjar is one of the most well-known names in the space. It combines session replays (called "Recordings") with Heatmaps, user feedback widgets, and onsite surveys. This allows you to not only watch what users do but also ask them why they did it, all within the same platform. Its interface is very marketer-friendly and provides a great balance of features and usability.

3. FullStory

Best for: Product and engineering teams.

FullStory positions itself as a "Digital Experience Intelligence" platform. It's more heavyweight than the others, often favored by product managers and engineers at larger companies. It retroactively records every single user session happening on your site, so you never miss anything. This makes it incredibly powerful for diagnosing complex bugs and building a deeper understanding of product usage, though its price point reflects its power.

The Perfect Workflow: GA4 + Session Replay Together

The real magic happens when you stop thinking about "GA4 vs. Session Replay" and start using them together. Their strengths and weaknesses complement each other perfectly.

Here’s a typical power workflow:

1. Identify the "What" in Google Analytics. You're looking at your funnel report in GA4 and notice a huge drop-off between the begin_checkout event and the purchase event specifically for users on Safari browsers. You now know what the problem is and who it affects.
2. Find an Example in Your Session Replay Tool. You switch over to a tool like Hotjar or Clarity and filter your recordings. You set the filters to: "Visited page containing '/checkout'" AND "Did NOT visit page containing '/thank-you'" AND "Browser is Safari."
3. Investigate the "Why." You watch a handful of the resulting session replays. You quickly spot a pattern: the credit card expiration date field is rendered incorrectly on Safari, making it impossible for users to complete the form. They try a few times and then abandon the session in frustration.
4. Fix and Verify. You send the recordings to your developer, who fixes the CSS bug. Your hypothesis is that fixing this bug will increase the conversion rate for Safari users. You continue monitoring your GA4 checkout funnel over the next few weeks to confirm that the drop-off rate decreases, thus proving your solution worked.

Final Thoughts

While Google Analytics 4 doesn't have a native session replay feature, it provides the essential quantitative data you need to spot opportunities and problems at scale. Its path and user exploration reports are powerful tools for tracing user journeys and understanding the sequence of actions that lead to specific outcomes.

To really understand user behavior, you need both the what and the why. We've seen firsthand how difficult it is to manually stitch together data from different platforms - like website traffic from GA, ad performance from Facebook, and sales data from Shopify - just to see the complete picture. It's why we built Graphed. Our platform connects all your data sources in seconds, letting you ask complex questions in plain English to build real-time dashboards and reports, saving you countless hours you’d otherwise spend wrangling spreadsheets.