How to Connect Survey Responses to Recordings

Hotjar offers the ability to connect popover and full screen Survey responses with the associated recording that features the response. You can then connect the dots between what the user said (their response) and what they experienced (session recording) while visiting your site.

This article covers the following:

• Consent options for connecting responses with Recordings
• Watching a recording and why a recording may be unavailable

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Consent options for connecting responses with Recordings

The options for connecting responses with Recordings are available inside the Questions section when setting up a survey. At the end of the Questions section, and inside the Thank you message you'll find a Connect responses with Recordings dropdown menu.

This dropdown menu displays the three options for managing this feature:

• Automatically connect responses with Recordings
• Ask for consent from users to connect responses with Recordings
• Never connect responses

Automatically connect responses with Recordings

This is the default setting for all newly created Surveys and will connect responses with the associated recordings when possible.

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Ask for consent from users to connect responses with Recordings

This second option connects responses with recordings only if the user has granted their consent first. Users will see the following message after they submit a response through a Survey:

If the user does not grant consent

• Their response will still be submitted, but no Hotjar User ID or searchable recording associated with the user’s visit will be collected. Instead, the response will show as an Anonymous user.

If the user grants consent

• The same Hotjar User ID that is assigned to the response will be assigned to previous and future recordings. This enables you to search for recordings of that user by applying a Hotjar User ID filter.

Granting consent allows you to collect and combine responses with:

• Any other responses previously submitted from the same device
• Location (limited to the country)
• Language used
• Device and browser used
• Custom attributes (e.g. products or services being using)
• Behavior and interactions on the page(s) visited

All behavior and interaction data collected will be retained for no longer than one year and will then be automatically deleted. All response data submitted is stored in accordance with our Data Retention Policy.

The right for the user to withdraw this consent is present at any time. From the date when the withdraw of consent occurs, we will no longer combine responses with information about behavior. Requests to have data removed by your user can be actioned with our User Lookup tool. Any data collected and combined from the date when consent was granted until the date of withdrawal would have been lawfully processed. The legal basis for processing this data, which might include personal data, if any provided, is Article 6(1)(a) EU General Data Protection Regulation.

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Never connect responses

This final option prevents Hotjar from connecting responses with other Hotjar insights. It will also mean that User Attributes won't be sent with on-site Survey responses. Instead, responses from surveys using this setting will display Anonymous instead of a Hotjar User ID. The request for consent message mentioned above will not be displayed in the Survey when using this setting.

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Watching a recording and why a recording may be unavailable

If a recording is available for a user's session, you can see the connected recording where a response was submitted from the Results tab of the specific survey. When available, you can click the Play recording icon to watch the connected recording.

Why is a recording unavailable and the play icon greyed out?

The play recording icon will be greyed out and the recording unavailable in the following cases:

• Recordings may not track all your users, resulting in some responses not having connected recordings.
• The user's session is still open and a recording hasn't yet been generated.
• A different consent option was selected for this survey, such as Ask for consent from users to connect responses with Recordings, and the user didn't give consent.
• The recording is older than 365 days and falls within the data retention policy.

 

Accessing responses directly from recordings

When viewing the playback of a session recording, you may see widget icons that indicate the user submitted a Feedback or NPS® Survey response:

If the response was connected to Recordings, you can hover over the icon and it will display a link to where you can view the specific response that was submitted. However, if the response was not connected to Recordings, you will see the icon in your Recordings playback, but you will not have a clickable link to view the response.

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