Tags cannot be used to collect email or IP addresses, or numbers with 9 or more digits
Since there is currently no way to use our User Lookup tool with tags or events, they cannot be used to collect emails or IP addresses. We also suppress numbers with 9 or more digits, to prevent credit card numbers being passed to Hotjar. This decision has been based on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). If you'd like to collect email addresses with your user's consent and in line with GDPR, you can do so with User Attributes.
Associating events or tags to your Recordings allows you to note specific actions, like CTA clicks, sign-ups, or user states. Once Recordings have been tagged or associated with an event, you can then filter by those tags/events in your Recordings dashboard.
We'll go into more detail for each of these features:
- Tag Recordings Manually: add a tag to a recording session when you're viewing it within the Hotjar Recordings player.
- Add events to Recordings through the Event API: add some JavaScript code on your site to associate an event with the user's session. This is only available to accounts on the Hotjar Plus plan or above.
1000 tag/event limit per Hotjar site
Hotjar Recordings Filters will only support 1,000 unique tags or events per Hotjar site. If you exceed this, only 1,000 of the most used tags/events (sorted 0-9, a-Z) will be searchable in the interface. This is a rolling total so once the limit is exceeded, some existing tags/events may become unsearchable in the filter. If you exceed the limit, you can delete recordings that contain any tags/events you no longer need. After around 10 minutes after deletion, your tag filter list will refresh.
To avoid the 1000 tag/event limit:
- Do not use Tags or Events to display any information unique to a user, or session. User Attributes has been designed for user data, and should be used instead.
- For A/B tests, you may want to use generic tags, rather than specific identifiers such as experiment codes, used by some A/B testing platforms
- For e-commerce sites, avoid specific product information, such as SKU codes. Usually, URLs are more useful, and are captured by default.
- Avoid passing anything like dates or timestamps.
- Avoid passing anything from URLs such as referral codes.
- Avoid passing detailed errors logs.
- Be careful when sending values from objects such as GTM data layers. These often hold more data than you expect.
How to add Tags to Recordings Manually
Open a Recording.
Select the Session Info panel from the top right.
Use the field provided to add new tags or delete existing ones by hitting the X next to them.
Editing and Deleting tags must be done manually within the Recording player
There is currently no automatic way to edit/remove tags. The tag will have to be edited/removed in every Recording it is tagged in order for the tag itself to be edited/removed.
How to add Events to Recordings
Hotjar Events is a feature for our paid plans
This is only available for Sites with a plan on Plus, Business, or Scale.
To add an event to a recording, add the events you wish to send using JavaScript code like this:
hj('event', 'pricing_page_variant_b');
All recordings of users who trigger this event will contain the event label "pricing_page_variant_b" in their session playback. This allows you to filter your Recordings based on a specific event. Your event might be called something else, and can be fired at anytime based on the JavaScript code used to trigger your event.
If there is a chance that the event code will be run before the Hotjar script has loaded, you must add this line of code just before the event code:
window.hj=window.hj||function(){(hj.q=hj.q||[]).push(arguments)};
The events can be any alphanumeric value you like including spaces, e.g. 'Checkout Page'. The Recording will fail to display an event if it has more than 250 characters.
A single Recording can have no more than 50 events associated with it. Any additional events will be ignored.
If you're interested in using Events to help target your users with Hotjar tools, visit How to Use Events for targeting Hotjar Tools.
You can also set up Hotjar Events through Google Tag Manager.
If you use Google Tag Manager to load the Hotjar script on your site, you can set up Events on the GTM tag that fires the Hotjar tracking code. Check out this guide to help set up Hotjar Events in GTM.