It's hardly new back in 2008, I worked for a company that used Tealeaf, a proxy that intercepted all web traffic before it even hit the load balancer, to record every click and request. It was used by the help desk and, when they couldn't figure it out, the Tealeaf session and player were forwarded to the devs. (This was a company under HIPPA, so a bunch of that data was related to personal health records).

In 2012, I worked at a University with analytic tools that showed a color map indicating the average scroll speed for pages on our website and heat maps indicating how long different users hovered over a section.

This stuff has been around for a long long time.