How to Create a Survey

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 4 - Selecting a type
• Step 5 - Adding questions and available question types
• Step 6 - Modifying your survey's appearance
• Step 7 - Configuring the targeting conditions for showing your survey
• Step 8 - Setting your survey's display behavior and frequency
• Step 9 - Forwarding responses to email or Slack
• Step 10 - 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.

Choose one of our pre-built templates, or click Start from scratch to define the survey yourself.

See our article on How To Use Survey Templates for more details.

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

Select a Type for your survey.

To learn more about what each type means, check out What is a Hotjar Survey?

• Link Survey responses cannot be connected to Recordings

  When using a Popover, Button 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.
• Add images (JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP files up to 2 MB) and use Hotjar Surveys for concept testing (available on Ask Business or Scale).
• 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.

For a complete list of each question type and explanations of how they work, check out What is a Hotjar Survey?

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, hidden, or replaced by your own logo (Ask Business and Ask Scale plans only)

(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 type.
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 How to Use Events for Survey and Feedback Targeting articles.
• 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 Slack, Microsoft Teams, Webhook URLs, email and the Responses API. For email forwarding, you can have multiple email addresses in the Receive responses via email field, separated by commas.
Surveys can also be added to a workflow via Zapier. 

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

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