What's new in Hotjar

Have you ever wanted to watch recordings of users who visited yoursite.com/checkout, but didn’t click “Buy”, so you could discover opportunities to improve your checkout flow?

How about sending an error event to Hotjar when your user encounters an issue, and being able to find all the recordings of users who experienced it, so you can see exactly what happened and build a case to fix it?

Maybe you’ve thought about automatically putting a survey in front of users just after they tried your new feature so you can find out how they feel about it?

Every product experience is different, and the user actions that are crucial in one product are insignificant in another. Targeting and filtering based on those key user events that are unique to your product experience will give you a deeper understanding of your users’ behavior.

This is a common use case of product teams, and while it’s possible to achieve in Hotjar using separate Javascript triggers and tags, we haven’t exactly made it easy. Until now.

Introducing Hotjar’s Events API

We’ve just released a new Events API that will allow you to send custom events to Hotjar, then use those events across Hotjar to do things like filter your recordings list, zone in on the insightful part of a long recording (with events now appearing in the timeline), or ask your users for feedback at the moment when they’ve just taken an important action.

Filtering your recordings to see what users experienced before they added an item to their cart or adding a rating

Seeing at what point in the recording a new user subscribed so you can skip right to that part

Here’s how to get started sending your important custom events to Hotjar, and getting a better understanding of your users with less time spent searching through recordings or survey responses to find the most relevant ones.

Events vs User Attributes

You may already be aware of our Identify API that sends custom user attributes to Hotjar. Attributes can also be used to filter recordings or target surveys, but they represent a different kind of data. User attributes are identifying characteristics of the user, like their nationality, job title, or price plan. They’re not tied to a specific point in time.

Importantly, user events are actions that a user takes at a specific point in time. They’re timestamped and can take place multiple times throughout the user journey. This is why you’ll see events represented in the timeline of a recording, where attributes are not.

So… to summarize:

• To send user attributes to Hotjar, use our Identify API - here’s how.
• To send user events to Hotjar, use our Events API - here’s how.

If you’re already using Javascript triggers or tags, don’t worry. They’ll continue to work, they’ll just be called ‘events’ instead. Events API is available on Hotjar’s Plus, Business, and Scale plans.