Hotjar generates Heatmaps by taking a screenshot of a page on your site and storing a copy of the HTML elements present on it. The Heatmap usage data is then transposed on top of the screenshot according to which elements your visitors interact with.
When targeting multiple pages by using Starts with, Ends with, Contains, or Regular Expression as match operators, Hotjar does not have a proper full URL, but a pattern to match URLs with. In general, this means that the first page a visitor reaches will be the page used to generate the screenshot and any other pages matching will then be matched with that page.
In some cases, it's preferable to decide which page to use for the screenshot. In such cases, the Custom Screenshot Page URL field is used. This simply tells Hotjar from where it can take a screenshot so that it can generate the Heatmap data collected on top of it.
When you use the Custom Screenshot Page URL data from other pages matching the target set will be collected straight away, but no screenshot will be generated until the specified page has been visited and past data collected will then be transposed onto that screenshot.
Usage example
To specify a URL click the Advanced link and the field will be visible.
If you set the Page URL so that it generates a heatmap for all your article pages on your site/blog as:
Contains /article/
Your Custom Screenshot Page URL should be a URL of one of those articles:
https://www.mydomain.com/article/some-article.
Note:
The Screenshot Page URL must match the HTML layout of the Page URLs you are targeting.