Signals
Nine ways a sale fails, found without you looking
Nobody watches a thousand recordings. Whence reads them for you, flags the visits where something went wrong, ranks them by how much they cost, and attaches the evidence.
What gets flagged
Every signal carries its proof
A signal is never a bare number. It arrives with the session that produced it, so the first thing you do is watch it rather than argue about it.
Behaviour
The same spot clicked again and again in quick succession. Something looks pressable and is not.
A click that changed nothing on the page. Usually a control that broke quietly.
The visitor never reached the part of the page you built the argument on.
Real attention that produced nothing. Often the most instructive recording of the week.
Abandonment and faults
They reached payment and left. The most expensive moment to lose someone.
A product was added and never bought.
A form was started and given up on. The recording shows which field lost them.
Your page broke during the visit. You would otherwise learn this from a complaint, or never.
An image or file failed to load. Frequently a product photo on the page that was supposed to sell.
Sorted by cost, not by count
Fifty shallow scrolls matter less than one broken checkout. Signals are weighted so the list starts where the money is.
- Severity is assigned per signal, from critical down, and drives the order you see.
- A completed purchase cancels the false alarm. If the visitor bought, the abandonment flag on that visit is withdrawn rather than left to inflate the list.
- Repeats are grouped, so one broken button appears once with its count instead of two hundred times.
A flagged session
- Signal checkout abandon
- Severity critical
- Source Meta Ads
- Device mobile
- Also seen 2 dead clicks
- Evidence session attached
It knows what a shop is
Generic replay tools see clicks. Whence recognises the four moments that decide whether a visit was worth anything.
- Added to cart, reached checkout, order completed and purchase are read as events, not guessed from page addresses.
- The funnel is built from them, so a drop between two steps is a place you can go and watch.
- Abandonment means something precise here, rather than a heuristic about time on page.
Biggest drop between checkout and order · 33 sessions to watch
Illustrative figures.
A list you can actually finish
Signals are meant to be closed, not admired. Each one carries a status so a week's work leaves a trace.
- Open, in progress, resolved. What you fixed stops coming back.
- Record what you changed against the signal, and measure whether it moved.
- New signals surface on their own as sessions accumulate. There is no report to run.
A week's list
- Open 7
- In progress 2
- Resolved 4
- Critical open 1
What signals here do not do
- No advice on what to change. Whence shows you the failure and the recording. Deciding what to do about it is your job, and we would rather not pretend otherwise.
- No alerting yet. Signals appear in the product; they do not email or message you when they occur.
- Detection needs volume. On a store with a handful of visits a day, patterns take a while to become patterns.