User Attribute targeting is only available to Business plan customers on V2 billing
Read more about upgrading to our Business plan. User Attributes are available on V2 billing plans or newer. If you are unsure which billing plan version you are on, read about How to Identify your Billing Version.
User Attributes are facts about your users taken from your site’s data that you can use to more quickly gain insight into the behavior and needs of the users who matter most to your business.
Once enabled, User Attributes allow you to filter Recordings, and target feedback widgets by these values. They also allow you to lookup and delete user data by user ID making it easy to respect your user's privacy rights - which is especially important when passing personal information to Hotjar.
Before you can start using User Attributes, the data for them needs to be sent to Hotjar from your site. Because these attributes come from your site data, Hotjar needs a little extra setup before it has access to them.
Your web developer must be involved during the first two steps to make sure the values you are choosing to target are available within your site. Hotjar handles the heavy lifting in step three. By step four, you'll be empowered to perform more analysis, get more targeted feedback, and responsibly handle personal information using our visitor lookup tools.
Setting up User Attributes is a 4-Step Process:
- Decide on the User Attributes most relevant to your business
- Review your privacy considerations
- Enable User Attributes and implement the code using Hotjar's Identify API
- Start using User Attributes in Hotjar!
Decide on the User Attributes most relevant to your business.
You should start by assessing what data from your own site's database you want to send to Hotjar as User Attributes.
Here are some common uses for User Attributes to get you started thinking about what is relevant to you:
- Filtering Recordings by paying customers.
- Polling users who signed up in the past 30 days.
- Asking for Incoming Feedback to all users who purchased a total of $500 worth of product from your site.
- Asking signed-in users to fill out a Poll.
A list of the data you'd like to send (users you'd like to target) should be given to your web developer to see if the values are available from your site.
Review your privacy requirements.
Hotjar is designed to help you anonymize data as much as possible by default, making it easy to conform with privacy legislation such as the GDPR without having to undergo too much extra work.
User Attributes are slightly different since they can include Personally-Identifying Information (PII). With User Attributes, we want to empower your ability to manage personal information sent to Hotjar while complying with privacy legislation.
You can read more about Hotjar's stance on privacy on our privacy page. We recommend reviewing your data privacy requirements before implementing User Attributes and request that you have accepted our Data Processing Agreement with us before using this feature.
Since PII must be deleted if a user requests, you are required to send a User ID as part of your User Attribute if you wish to send any PII to Hotjar. More information about deleting PII based on user requests can be found in What are Hotjar's Visitor Lookup features?
Enable User Attributes and implement the code using Hotjar's Identify API.
User Attributes must be installed/enabled with the help of your developer
The ability to send User Attributes to Hotjar will be disabled until you have enabled them in your User Attributes page and successfully added/written the User Attribute code.
On your User Attributes page, find the Site you want to add User Attributes to using the selection drop-down. Click Enable User Attributes.
This snippet is an example of the kind of code you might need to have on your page. Your web developer will need to write additional code to send user attributes to Hotjar. Detailed coverage of the Identify API is available in the Identify API Reference Guide.
Once your developer pastes the snippet and adds the additional coding, you will be presented with a dialogue box. The pop-up confirms you have reviewed privacy considerations before enabling User Attributes, including agreeing to have signed a Data Processing Agreement with us.
Once enabled, calls to the Identify API will pass User Attribute data to Hotjar for this Site.
It is possible to disable User Attributes on this page as well. Check out How to disable User Attributes for a step by step guide.
Start using User Attributes in Hotjar!
Once you have enabled User Attributes, and your developer has implemented the code necessary to send data to Hotjar, you will start seeing them appear in the User Attributes management page.
From here, you can currently do the following with User Attributes:
- Filter Recordings by User Attributes.
- Target feedback widgets by User Attributes.
- Lookup and delete user data by user ID.
Want to see User Attributes available in other Hotjar tools?
In the future, we’re planning for all Hotjar tools to be able to take advantage of User Attributes in some way. If you had any ideas about what you’d like to see from User Attributes next, let us know!