1. Introduction

1.1 What is FullSession?

Welcome to FullSession! This chapter gives you a high-level understanding of what FullSession is, how it works, and the vocabulary you'll see throughout the rest of the documentation. If you're new to FullSession, start here — the later chapters assume you're comfortable with the concepts introduced below.

FullSession is a session-replay and product-analytics platform that helps you understand how real people use your website. Instead of guessing why visitors drop off, abandon a cart, or fail to convert, you can watch their actual sessions, see exactly where they get stuck, and quantify those moments across thousands of users.

In a single platform, FullSession brings together:

• Session replay — pixel-perfect recordings of real user visits, complete with mouse movement, scrolls, clicks, taps, console errors, and network activity.

• Heatmaps — aggregated visualizations of where people click, how far they scroll, and which elements cause frustration.

• Funnels — multi-step conversion flows that show exactly where users drop off, with one-click access to the sessions behind each drop-off.

• Segments — saved groups of users defined by behavior, location, device, or any custom attribute you send.

• Dashboards & insights — customizable views built from your own metrics and widgets.

• Feedback & surveys — an in-page widget for collecting CSAT scores and qualitative responses.

• Lift AI — natural-language analysis that surfaces issues, builds segments from a prompt, and explains funnel drop-offs in plain English.

• Alerts — proactive notifications when something in your funnel, segment, or site behavior changes.

Who FullSession is for

FullSession is built for the people who care about the user experience on a website:

• Product managers — validate feature usage and prioritize what to build next.

• UX & design teams — see how visitors actually interact with new layouts.

• Growth & conversion specialists — diagnose funnel drop-offs and run experiments.

• Customer support — replay a specific user's session to debug an issue they reported.

• QA teams — reproduce hard-to-find bugs by watching the exact session where they happened.

• Executives — track high-level KPIs across all of your sites in one dashboard.

What problems does it solve?

You want to know…	FullSession answers it with…
Why are users dropping off at checkout?	Funnels + session replays of drop-offs
Which buttons do people actually click?	Click heatmaps
Is anyone hitting that new feature?	Custom events + insight cards
What did the user do right before this error?	Console & network panels inside the player
How happy are visitors with this page?	Embedded CSAT widget
Are conversions getting worse this week?	Alerts on segments and funnels

---

1.2 How FullSession Works

FullSession has three stages: capture → process → insights. Once it's set up, the entire pipeline runs automatically — you only interact with the third stage.

Stage 1 — Capture

A small JavaScript snippet (the tracker) runs on every page of your site. As visitors browse, it records:

• DOM mutations needed to replay the page exactly

• Mouse movement, clicks, taps, and scrolls

• Page navigation and URL changes

• Console messages and JavaScript errors

• Network requests

• Custom events and user identity (if you choose to send them)

The tracker is asynchronous and designed to have no measurable impact on page performance. Sensitive content (passwords, credit-card fields, anything you mark) is masked at capture time — it never leaves the visitor's browser.

Stage 2 — Process

Captured data is streamed to the FullSession cloud, where it is:

1. Indexed so you can filter sessions by any attribute in milliseconds.

2. Aggregated into heatmaps, page statistics, segment counts, and funnel metrics.

3. Analyzed by Lift AI for emerging issues and conversion problems.

4. Stored for the retention period included with your plan.

You don't have to do anything here — processing happens within seconds of a session ending, and most sessions are watchable in near real-time.

Stage 3 — Insights

This is where you spend your time. From the FullSession web app you can:

• Watch any session in the player

• Build funnels, segments, and dashboards

• View heatmaps for any page

• Read feedback & survey responses

• Configure alerts that notify you when things change

---

1.3 Key Concepts & Glossary

These terms appear throughout the documentation. Knowing what each one means will make every other chapter easier to read.

Site

A site is a property you track in FullSession — typically one domain (e.g. example.com). You can have multiple sites under the same account, each with its own tracker, settings, sessions, and dashboards.

Visitor

A visitor is a unique person browsing your site. Visitors are anonymous by default. If you send identity information through the tracker (such as an email or user ID), they become identified visitors and are searchable by those traits.

Session

A session is one continuous visit by a single visitor. It begins when they land on your site and ends after a period of inactivity or when they leave. Every session has a recording you can play back.

Event

An event is any meaningful action recorded during a session — a click, a page view, a form submission, a console error, or a custom event you define (such as "Added to cart"). Events are what funnels, segments, and insight cards are built on.

Element

An element is anything you can point at on the page — a button, link, image, form field, or container. FullSession lets you target elements by CSS selector to build heatmaps, watched-element reports, and custom events.

Tag

A tag is a label attached to a session, so you can find or group sessions later. Some tags are predefined (e.g. "rage click", "error"), and some are custom — added manually or automatically based on rules you set.

Segment

A segment is a saved group of visitors or sessions matching a set of conditions ("Mobile users from Germany who reached the checkout page"). Segments power filtered dashboards, funnels, alerts, and AI analysis.

Funnel

A funnel is a sequence of steps you want users to complete (for example: View product → Add to cart → Checkout → Purchase). FullSession shows the conversion rate between each step and the sessions where users dropped off.

Heatmap

A heatmap is an aggregated visualization of behavior on a single page — where people clicked, how far they scrolled, or which elements they interacted with most.

Dashboard

A dashboard is a customizable page made up of widgets — charts, counters, lists, and other visualizations powered by your data. FullSession ships with role-based templates (Executive, Growth, Engineering, Product, Digital Ops) and you can build your own from scratch.

Insight Card

An insight card is a single widget on a dashboard. Each card shows one metric (such as "Average session duration this week vs. last week"). You build dashboards by combining cards.

Alert

An alert is a rule that watches a metric, segment, or funnel and notifies you when something changes — a conversion rate drops, an error spikes, or a goal is met.

Lift AI

Lift AI is FullSession's built-in assistant. It can analyze funnels, generate segments from a natural-language description, and surface user-experience issues automatically.

---

1.4 Plans & Feature Availability

FullSession is available on several plans, each unlocking a different set of features and capacity (sessions per month, data retention, team seats, etc.).

Plan tiers at a glance

Plan	Best for	Highlights
Free	Individuals and small sites trying FullSession	Limited monthly sessions, core replay, heatmaps, feedback
Growth	Teams doing day-to-day analysis	Funnels, event tracking, alerts, UTM tracking, integrations
Pro	Established product & growth teams	Everything in Growth, plus Lift AI, dashboards & charts, longer retention
Enterprise	Organizations with security & compliance needs	SSO (SAML), RBAC & custom roles, audit logs, dedicated support, custom limits

Note — exact session quotas, retention periods, and pricing are listed on the [FullSession pricing page]. Always check the pricing page for the most current details, as plans evolve over time.

Feature availability by plan

Throughout this documentation, features that are not on every plan are marked with a tag:

• Growth — available on Growth and higher

• Pro — available on Pro and higher

• Enterprise — available on Enterprise only

For example, funnels and alerts are Growth features, Lift AI and dashboards are Pro+, and SSO, custom roles, and audit logs are Enterprise. In the app, locked areas show a badge naming the first plan that includes them and an Upgrade plan link. A full feature-by-plan table lives in [Chapter 17, section 17.1].

Upgrading or changing plans

You can change plans at any time from Settings → Subscription. Upgrades and downgrades take effect immediately and start a fresh billing cycle — FullSession doesn't prorate the remainder of the old one. See [Chapter 17 — Billing & Subscriptions] for the full walkthrough.

What happens if you exceed your quota?

If you hit your monthly session limit, FullSession will continue to display your existing data but will pause new recording until the next cycle or until you upgrade. Track how close you are on the usage bar under Settings → Subscription, and per site in the site picker in the top bar ([Chapter 17, section 17.6]).

---

Next up: [Chapter 2 — Getting Started] walks you through creating your account, adding your first site, installing the tracker, and watching your first session.