Starting Continuous Recordings

As of November 2021, all Hotjar plans will benefit from Continuous Recordings, which allow you to record sessions continuously each day. Continuous Recordings replaced the Snapshot-based method of recording collection, which was used in the past. Continuous Recordings mean there is no need to manually restart Snapshots, so you experience no gaps in data collection!

• How continuous capture works
• When do these rates apply?
• What is the Pageview Collection Rate?
• How do I enable Continuous Recordings?
• Are Recording Snapshots still available?

How continuous capture works

Based on your plan, each Site on your account has a daily session limit, that applies to both continuous Heatmaps and Recordings.

Below are the daily session limits on Hotjar plans:

Let’s visualize this for a site on a 1,500 daily Recording limit over the course of 14 days:

A) Hotjar is able to track all potential sessions, because the daily session limit is being met.

B) Hotjar isn't tracking 100% of potential sessions, but the same number of sessions are being recorded each day, according to the plan limit.

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When do these rates apply?

If your plan covers all your site traffic, then most sessions will be captured (there are some reasons why Hotjar may not be able to capture all users). If you're unsure about whether Hotjar is capturing all potential traffic it could track, you can see what percentage of your traffic is covered in the top right hand corner of all pages inside Hotjar insights.

If you exceed your daily Recording rate, Hotjar will capture traffic up to your daily limit. When this happens, Hotjar adjusts the flow of Recordings based on the total number of sessions recorded over a moving 24-hour window. This gives you an even distribution of Recordings throughout the day.

Let’s imagine you have a newsletter you send out just after lunchtime. If your daily rate stopped recording half-way through the day, you’d miss all sessions that happened after the newsletter was sent, along with the valuable data from your newsletter readers. To prevent this, Hotjar adjusts your tracking rate automatically throughout the day, to ensure new sessions can always be tracked.

Here’s an illustration of how your Recording rates might vary throughout the day:

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What is the Pageview Collection Rate?

The pageview collection rate is only used by Manual Heatmaps. Your daily Recording rate is entirely separate from your pageview collection rate.  Recording rates are based on the number of sessions captured in a 24-hour window while a 'pageview' occurs each time the Hotjar script loads on a page (this can happen many times within the same session). This means sample rates for Recordings compared with Manual Heatmaps may be different.

Over time, all Hotjar tools will be changed to use the same unit to collect and visualize data: sessions. Until we adopt session-based data capture for all tools, we will maintain rates for both pageviews and sessions. We understand this might be a little confusing, so thanks for bearing with us!

How do I enable Continuous Recordings?

If you are already collecting Recordings, then you’re already capturing Recordings continuously - no further action is needed!

If Recordings are inactive, the top right hand corner of your Recordings playback list will show a message saying Session capturing not enabled. Clicking on Enable Session Capture, takes you to your Site Settings configuration page. Learn more about Configuring Site Settings.

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Are Recording Snapshots still available?

Based on an overwhelming amount of feedback, we've learned that the Snapshot-based method for collecting recordings was confusing and frustrating for the majority of our users. Continuous Recordings means Snapshots are no longer needed and Snapshot-based Recordings will no longer be available going forward.

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