Does Hotjar track all your users?

Hotjar captures the majority of user sessions in Heatmaps and Recordings, depending on your Observe plan's daily session limits. However, due to the specific browser settings of each website visitor, technical limitations, and possibly your current settings inside Hotjar, it may not be possible to capture 100% of all your site visitors.

To understand why some sessions are not being captured, it is important to understand the difference between total traffic, potential traffic, and traffic coverage:

• Total traffic refers to all user sessions that interact with your website. This includes sessions that Hotjar cannot track for reasons beyond our control. 
• Potential traffic is made of visits to your site that Hotjar can potentially capture, depending on your Observe plan and settings. Learn more about why some sessions cannot be tracked.
• Traffic coverage describes the rate of sessions that Hotjar is actively tracking. You can view it from your traffic coverage widget, in the top right of any page within Hotjar. Your Observe plan will determine if some sessions fall outside of traffic coverage.

Why isn't Hotjar able to track all sessions?

Hotjar does its best to collect data from all user sessions that it detects on your website. However, there are situations that prevent Hotjar from detecting or tracking some user sessions. In most cases, the reason relates to the user's browser and/or local network environment, so it's beyond our ability to control. The table below shares the most common reasons why Hotjar might not track a session:

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Why might a session fall outside traffic coverage?

In some cases, Hotjar is able to load on the user's page, but their session isn't stored within your Hotjar dashboard. This can be due to settings inside Hotjar which may result in a specific user's session being discarded. 

• Your Observe plan's traffic coverage did not include this user.
  If your potential traffic exceeds your Observe plan limits, Hotjar will capture a portion of your traffic called your traffic coverage, which we also refer to as Sampling. Learn more about sampling.

  Our older Manual Heatmaps which are now retired used pageview-based traffic coverage, rather than session-based coverage. This means that the traffic coverage detected by Manual Heatmaps did not reflect the same coverage that you see in Continuous Heatmaps or Recordings.

  Session coverage becomes more accurate after the first 7 days after Hotjar is installed, so if your rate of daily traffic is higher than your Observe plan limit, parts of the day may be missed from tracking during the first 7 days.

• "Only 30s+ sessions" is enabled in your session capture settings.
  This can be disabled in your site settings, under the targeting section, and the video below steps through how to do this. This setting is enabled by default to avoid lower-value Recordings (sessions that don't have much activity). Enabling it often explains differences in traffic compared to other sources, such as Google Analytics, ad software analytics, or your server logs.

• The user may not have visited a page you are targeting. 
  Learn more about How to trigger Recordings and Heatmaps based on URLs. We recommend tracking all pages for the maximum coverage.

• Pages on your site are served over HTTP instead of HTTPS
  To provide a more secure experience in Hotjar, we don't capture those pages within a session that are being served using the HTTP protocol. Hotjar will only capture pages within a session that are being sent over HTTPS. In addition to Heatmaps and Recordings, this also includes Feedback widgets and Surveys which won't display on pages using HTTP. For help on moving your site to HTTPS see this guide from Google on the steps you can take.

• The user's IP is blocked within your Hotjar settings.
  If the user's IP address was added to your IP block list, Hotjar will not process their session.

• The session did not have any user activity.
  If Hotjar did not detect any activity during the user's session, the recording associated with that session will be discarded.
  We currently consider a potential recording as “having activity” if it contains at least one event of the following types: “Input Change”, “Key Press”, “Mouse Click”, “Select Change” or “Viewport Scroll”

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Understanding traffic coverage

To check your current traffic coverage, you'll see a 'traffic coverage widget' in the top right hand corner of all pages within Hotjar. The widget button changes depending on your Tracking Code activity.

• X% traffic coverage: after 7 days of consistent data capture, Hotjar will tell you what percentage of traffic is covered.
• Tracking Active: this will show after Hotjar is first installed, or re-enabled after a period of inactivity. After 7 days, it will change to showing the traffic coverage.
• Tracking Issue: Hotjar has not detected activity on your site for some time. This could happen naturally if you're tracking a dev site, or site with very little traffic. However, it may also mean the Hotjar Tracking Code was removed. You may want to verify your Hotjar tracking code installation to confirm that Hotjar is still properly installed.
• Session Tracking: Disabled: data collection is disabled. You can re-enable in your Site Settings.

Clicking on this widget will tell you more information about your current plan limits, as well as tell you how much potential traffic your site received per day compared with the daily sessions allowance provided under your Observe plan.

When Hotjar has only just been installed (or re-enabled), the potential traffic figure will be estimated based on the data collected so far. This happens because we need to measure how much traffic your site gets over time. This helps us calibrate traffic coverage so that Hotjar can capture data evenly throughout the day, even if you exceed your Observe plan daily session limits.

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