How to Set Up Surveys

In this article, we'll step through how to set up a Survey inside Hotjar. It's important to remember that when creating a survey it will be in a draft state (Inactive) until you set your survey to Active in the last step of the creation process for your survey.

If you're getting started, you can run through the set up in the order presented below, starting at Step 1. Otherwise, if you're editing an existing survey you can use the links below to skip to a particular step.

• Step 3 - Selecting a location
• Step 4 - Adding questions and available question types
• Step 5 - Modifying your survey's appearance
• Step 6 - Configuring the targeting conditions for showing your survey
• Step 7 - Setting your survey's display behavior and frequency
• Step 8 - Forwarding responses to email or Slack
• Step 9 - Making your survey active, or keeping a draft survey by making it inactive

After your survey has collected some responses, see our article on How to view Survey responses for more details on filtering response data and checking your survey's performance.

---

On the top right-hand side of your Surveys page, click on the New survey button.

In the Details section, enter a name and description for your survey. These details aren't visible to your users.

Select a Location for your survey.

Surveys can be displayed as one of the following:

• Popover
  A small widget shown on your webpage. Users can continue to interact with other content on the same page.
• Full Screen
  Displays as a larger overlay window in the center of the page. The background content is greyed out so that your survey is the main focus.
• Link
  Loads on a stand-alone page with its own designated web address (URL) that is separate to your website. The URL for a Link Survey is provided to you when you finish creating a survey. It will be located underneath your survey title on the responses page and starts with https://surveys.hotjar.com/.

• Link Survey responses cannot be connected to Recordings

  When using a Popover or Full Screen Survey, Hotjar offers the ability to connect the survey responses with recordings from the same user. This functionality is not possible for Link Survey responses.

Add the Questions you'd like to ask your users.

A new survey has two questions added by default that you can change during the setup.

In the Questions section, you can:

• Add, delete, modify, and re-order questions as needed.
• See a Preview of how your survey will look and function to test out the experience before you activate your survey.
• Drag and drop questions from a Question Bank of pre-defined questions to help you get started.
• Toggle questions as required or not, with optional questions displaying a Skip button.

• Survey responses may be submitted with some questions left unanswered

  It's possible to receive a Survey response with some of the questions showing a blank space instead of an answer. This can happen when a user skips an optional question. It can also happen if you're using a Popover or Full Screen survey and the user answers one or more questions but then abandons the page without answering the remaining questions.
  Hotjar will send the collected question responses to your Surveys dashboard and the questions that were not answered will show up with blank responses.

• Include URLs in the question, which automatically become clickable.
• Randomize possible answers (for checkbox or radio button question types).
• Pin the last answer to the bottom of a list, such as for an "Other" answer (for checkbox or radio button question types).
• Add a Thank You message, to display to users when they complete the Survey.

Available question types are:

Question Type	What's Shown
Long text answers	Displays a multi-line text box for the user to type in.
Short text answers	Displays a single-line text field for the user to type in.
Email (with validation)	Only accepts __@__.__ format. The validation checks the email address format but doesn't check to determine if the email address given is connected to an active inbox.
Yes/No	'Yes' and 'No' appear as radio buttons for the user to choose from.
Radio buttons	Allows free-form comments and randomization of answers options.
Checkboxes	Allows free-form comments and randomization of answers options.
1-5 and/or 1-7 Rating Scale	A custom question appears over a rating scale, allowing users to select a number 1-5 or 1-7.
Net Promoter Score®	A 0-10 rating scale with customizable low and high score labels. See our Net Promoter Score® guide for more details.
Statement	Displays custom text without providing a response field. Statements contain a title field and an optional description field.

Modify the Appearance of your survey.

In the Appearance section, you can modify:

• Language
• Color (Ask Business and Ask Scale plans only)
• Positioning on your page (Popover surveys only)
• Whether the Hotjar branding is shown (Ask Business and Ask Scale plans only)
• Whether to show a logo uploaded by you (Link Surveys only)

Example of a Popover Survey

(This step only applies to Link surveys) Configure the On-site invitation settings.

You'll see an option to enable an on-site invitation if you selected Link for your survey Location.
When the on-site invitation is enabled, a pop-up window will ask your users if they'd like to participate in a survey. If they agree, the user will be taken to the Link survey page. If they decline, the pop up will close and they will not see any of the survey questions.

The on-site invitation button color will be determined by your survey's Appearance settings. You can customize the text that appears in the on-site invitation by clicking Customize Invitation. If you don't enable the invitation, then your users will not be able to access your Link survey from your website.

In the Targeting section, configure the conditions for showing your survey.

In this section you can configure:

• The Devices that you'd like the survey to appear on or the on-site invitation if using a Link survey.
• The Pages that should display your survey or invitation. For more details on how to show your survey or invitation on only specific pages, see our How to trigger Surveys or Feedback based on URLs or Events article.
• Which Users should see the Survey, with the ability to select specific users if you've set up User Attributes which is available on the Ask Business or Scale plans. To have User Attributes available in exports of Survey data, you'll need to also enable session capture. For details on enabling session capture, see our Configuring Site Settings article.
• The percentage of Traffic coverage that should see your survey or on-site invitation (Ask Plus, Ask Business, and Ask Scale plan only).

Define the Behavior of your survey.

From your survey's Behavior section you can:

• Set when to Display the survey (or invitation if using a Link survey).

  Mobile/tablet users will not see a Survey if the behavior is based on "abandon".

  Setting the behavior to When a user is about to abandon the page on a desktop device will prevent the Survey from ever appearing to users on a mobile device or tablet.

• Specify the Frequency for showing your survey to users, and determine whether or not multiple responses can be submitted by the same user.

Enable Forward Response to be notified when a user responds to your survey.

Survey responses can be forwarded to email or Slack and Surveys can also be added to a workflow via Zapier. For email forwarding, you can have multiple email addresses in the Receive responses via email field, separated by commas.

In Review & Activate, finish creating your survey by clicking on Active and then click Create Survey.

Back to top

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.