Troubleshooting FAQs for Surveys

To work out why a survey isn't appearing, here are some key checks to make:

• Are there still responses available for this month in the response allowance for your subscribed Ask plan?

  When the response allowance limit for your Ask plan is reached, any surveys will stop showing on your site. Inside Hotjar, a banner above your Survey or Feedback widget indicates when you’re at 50% and 100% of your response allowance. The survey will reappear when your response allowance is reset the next calendar month or if you upgrade in the meantime, making more responses available. See our How the Ask Plan Response Allowance Works article for more details.

• Has the survey been created on the correct Hotjar Site?

  If you have more than one Site in your Hotjar account, ensure your survey was created in the correct Hotjar Site. You can switch between your Sites by clicking on the building icon in the top-left corner when logged into Hotjar.

• Is the tracking code installed on the page where you're wanting to show the widget?

  Visit our article on How to Check That Hotjar Is Working for help with testing this.

• Is the survey set to Active?

  Your widget will be in a draft state (Inactive) and won't appear on your live site until you set your survey to Active in the last step of the set up process.

• Have you already answered, or previously taken an action on the live widget?

  Depending on the survey and its settings, Hotjar stores a cookie when you answer or close a survey so it doesn't show again. Use the incognito or private mode of your web browser, which does not store cookies, to test this. This rule does not apply to Feedback widgets.

• Does your browser have enhanced security settings enabled?

  If you're using a Private or Incognito browsing mode, check to see if enhanced security settings are being enabled. These might be preventing some Hotjar tools from loading.

• Does your browser have cookies enabled and is a supported browser?

• Is your Content Security Policy blocking any aspects of Hotjar on the page?

• Are there other Surveys or Feedback widgets targeting the same page with a greater level of priority?

  Feedback widgets are always given the lowest priority, while for Surveys, the most recent one that you created will have the highest priority.

If your survey isn't showing correctly on the targeted page, or if fonts and layouts seem off, your site's CSS may be overriding the CSS used for Hotjar's Surveys. Check your site's CSS in case it is preventing the CSS used in the Hotjar widget.

A possible fix for this would be to have your developer add a :not() pseudo-class to the affected CSS selector. This would apply the styling to all buttons except for those which match the argument set in :not().

Hotjar surveys have a class applied, beginning with _hj, so for most sites you can apply a :not() which says, don't apply this CSS to anything that has a class starting with _hj.

For example, if your CSS is targeting a button element, your CSS rule could be button:not([class^="_hj"]). There are other ways to resolve this, so consult with your web developer to determine the best options for your site.

You can disable or deactivate a survey by switching the Status toggle of the survey to "Inactive" in the upper-right corner of your survey results page.

It's not possible to customize the CSS of a survey. For Ask Business and Ask Scale plan customers, you're able to change the color within the Appearance step of your setup.

While you can set multiple surveys and feedback widgets to target a page, Hotjar will only show one widget on a targeted page at a time to avoid user frustration. The Feedback tool is always given the lowest priority, while for Surveys, the most recent one that you created will have the highest priority.

For example, in this scenario you create the following, all targeting the same page:
4 days ago: Survey 'A' targeting the homepage
3 days ago: Started a Feedback widget on the homepage
Yesterday: Survey 'B' targeting the homepage

Each widget will show one at a time starting with Survey 'B' as the most recently created. Survey 'A' will only show if the user answers Survey 'B' and visits the homepage again while browsing. Once both Surveys have been answered, the Feedback widget will show.

Popup Surveys can only be located on the bottom of the page, with a choice of left or right side positioning. You can change the positioning in the Appearance step of the Survey set up page. The placement of Full screen and Link surveys cannot be changed.

Only a team member with Admin access or higher will be able to make these changes. To change the URL for the Privacy policy page link, visit your Sites & Organizations page. Then click on the gear icon to enter the Site settings page and click the Site information section where you can enter the Site Privacy Policy URL.

The language selected within a survey's set up will only affect the text of the survey that is not customizable. This includes the rating labels, input placeholder text, and Send or Skip buttons.

Any customizable text needs to be manually written in your desired language.

It is possible for a survey to be answered more than once by a user if the type is changed from Link to Popover or Full Screen, after the survey is created. This is because survey interactions that occur on an external page (using a Link survey) are evaluated separately from surveys that appear on your website (Popover or Full Screen).

For example, if a user responds directly to a Link survey and an invite is later added to the page, the user would be able to see and accept the invite that appears on your website, but they would not be able to answer the survey twice. Instead they would see a message thanking them for already submitting the survey.

Similarly, if a user declines an invite to a Link survey and the survey type is later changed from Link to Popover or Full Screen, they would be able to see and respond to the Popover or Full screen survey. The reason is that Link surveys use different cookies than the on-site surveys (Popover or Full Screen), to determine who has interacted with them in the past.