Why aren't all visits recorded? Why do some sessions have 0 seconds as their duration?

There's a few reasons for this:

1. Bots

The internet is full of bots, like Google's bot, which are constantly crawling websites on the internet to build their search index and scrape information. We know you want to view replays of shoppers - not bots - so we filter out bot traffic to prevent your session recording limit from being consumed by them. In some cases, bots may still get through and these can show up as sessions with 0 seconds duration.

You can disable bot filtering from the Settings page in the app.

2. Bounces

A percentage of shoppers will visit your site and leave within a second or two. These visits are called bounces and may be too brief to be recorded by our app or may get listed as having 0 seconds duration.

Note: a "good" bounce rate for an e-commerce site is between 20-45% (source: https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/ecommerce-bounce-rate.) On an unoptimized site, you can expect 50% or more of your visits to be bounces resulting in 50% or more of your sessions in Propel Replays being under 3 seconds in duration.

3. Large image files

To ensure we don’t affect page load speed, Propel Replays is one of the last scripts to load on your site. If your site has large image files that visitors have to download, this delays the loading of our app and affects how much of a visit gets recorded.

4. Load order

Shopify adds our app's code to the bottom of your site making it one of the last things to load on your site. If a shopper bounces (stays on your site for only a few seconds) or leaves before the page is fully loading, this can result in no session being recorded or a session with a duration of less than a few seconds.

5. Browser limitations

Some browsers may not run our session recording software including privacy focused browsers, old browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer) and browsers with Javascript disabled.