What's new in Hotjar

Exciting changes are coming to the way Hotjar captures data and provides you with user insights. It’s all kicking off the week of November 30 - just two weeks from now - so read on and take note. 👩🏽‍🏫

First up - why are we making these changes? In short: to make Hotjar smarter and easier to use. You can see our VP of Product, Megan Murphy, run through it in under 4 mins (in the video below), or dive deeper into the blog post we put out in August.

Now to the questions you’re asking yourself...

• What exactly is changing?
• When is it happening?
• What’s in it for me?

Here’s what you need to know:

If your site is on Hotjar Business, from November 30:

• You’ll get access to our new Continuous Heatmaps. The same sessions you’re capturing in Recordings will automatically populate your Heatmaps. You’ll still have access to the current version of Heatmaps while we’re busy fine-tuning Continuous Heatmaps and adding extra features. 🙌
• The user data you capture in Hotjar will be measured in sessions instead of pageviews. This means your plan’s data capture allowance will also be expressed in sessions, starting at 500 sessions/day for our $/€99 Business plan. 📏
• Session targeting will be managed in site settings, applying to both Recordings and Continuous Heatmaps. The targeting rules you already have set up for Recordings will automatically apply to Continuous Heatmaps. 🎯

If your site is on Hotjar Plus, from November 30:

• You’ll get access to Continuous Recordings & Continuous Heatmaps. No more manually creating snapshots! You’ll still have access to the current version of Heatmaps while we’re busy fine-tuning Continuous Heatmaps and adding extra features. 🙌
• The user data you capture in Hotjar will be measured in sessions instead of pageviews. Your plan’s data capture allowance will be 100 sessions per day. 📏
• Session targeting will be managed in site settings and will apply to both Recordings and Continuous Heatmaps. 🎯

If your site is on Hotjar Basic:

• Stay tuned! We’re still fine-tuning how we’ll bring you a top-notch Recordings and Heatmaps experience based on our new way of collecting data. Details to come in early 2021. 📆

Now that you’ve got the highlights, let’s look at each of the changes in a little more detail:

Continuous Recordings

Let's face it, starting (and restarting) snapshots in order to generate recordings and heatmaps isn't a natural step in your workflow. It can be confusing. You stop seeing new recordings, you get frustrated when you realize you need to manually restart a recording snapshot to avoid gaps in your data. We’ve learned from your feedback and built a new way of capturing recordings data in Hotjar, automatically and continuously.

Visit our docs to learn how to get started with Continuous Recordings.

Continuous Heatmaps

Just as in Recordings, Continuous Heatmaps will mean that Hotjar automatically and continuously captures data. With session data consistently flowing into your Heatmaps, you'll be able to analyze user behavior with less hassle and you'll find more opportunity for insight across your entire site. Previously, when you wanted to view a heatmap of a particular page on your site, you had to go into Hotjar, create a snapshot, and wait for the snapshot to capture data before getting any insights. With Continuous Heatmaps, it’s as easy as opening Heatmaps, entering the URL of the page you’re interested in, and hitting ‘Go’.

We're still working on making our new Continuous Heatmaps experience top-notch. So while we're busy fine-tuning it with features like better date filters and list views, you can either opt in to the new Continuous version (with a "Beta" label) or stick with the previous ‘snapshot’ version of Heatmaps until the new one is up to snuff 😉. We'll keep you posted on when that is after the holiday season.

Capturing data in sessions

Until now, when you’ve come to Hotjar to get to work, you’ve had to grapple with understanding how we measure your traffic in pageviews, i.e. an instance of a webpage loading. Here’s the verdict from across Hotjar’s customer base: you don’t tend to think in pageviews. The more common (and complete) measure of your traffic is sessions, i.e. the unique period of time your user is actively interacting with your site. If you count yourself among the folks who have been confused by our pageviews approach - this update will be a welcome change.

Session-based continuous capture is replacing pageview-based snapshots as the core way in which Hotjar captures data. This means that the pageview allowance in our Plus and Business plans will be replaced by a session allowance. For 98% of Hotjar customers, the new way of session-based continuous capture will mean that they will capture more data and generate more insights than ever before.

Session targeting

With data continuously rolling into Hotjar, you’ll need a place to manage how you target the visitor sessions you care about most. The place to do that is now in Site Settings. These rules will determine which session data Hotjar captures for both Recordings and Heatmaps. The end result = more consistent data in both tools. 💪

See our Site Settings & Configuration Guide to learn how to optimize your Hotjar setup to get the data you need.

We’re really excited about bringing you these changes - to give you a better understanding of your users, to help you build better experiences, and hopefully make your job just a little easier along the way. As always, our support team is here to help if you have any questions.

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