Sites on Business and Plus plans record sessions continuously on a daily basis. This is instead of recording a fixed Snapshot of sessions before stopping, which is the case for our Basic plans. Continuous Recordings mean there is no need to manually restart Snapshots, so you experience no gaps in data collection between Snapshots.
- How continuous capture works
- When do these rates apply?
- What about my pageview collection rate?
- How do I enable continuous capture for Recordings?
- Are Recording Snapshots no longer 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:
|
Plan Billed Monthly |
Pageview Collection Rate |
Daily Session Limit |
|
Basic |
2,000 pageviews/day |
|
|
Plus $/€39 |
10,000 pageviews/day |
100 Recordings |
|
Business $/€99 |
20,000 pageviews/day |
500 Recordings |
|
Business $/€189 |
50,000 pageviews/day |
1,500 Recordings |
|
Business $/€289 |
120,000 pageviews/day |
2,500 Recordings |
|
Scale $/€389 |
200,000 pageviews/day |
4,000 Recordings |
|
Scale $/€589 |
400,000 pageviews/day |
8,000 Recordings |
|
Scale $/€989 |
800,000 pageviews/day |
15,000 Recordings |
|
Need more? |
Let’s visualize this for a site on a 1,500 daily Recording rate over the course of 14 days, comparing Snapshots to your daily Recording rate.
When do these rates apply?
If your plan covers all your site traffic, then all sessions will be captured (though bear in mind reasons why Hotjar may not be able to capture 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 from this window, along with the valuable data from your newsletter readers.
Here’s an illustration of how your Recording rates might vary throughout the day:
What about my pageview collection rate?
Your daily Recording rate is entirely separate from your pageview collection rate. The pageview collection rate is only used by Manual Heatmaps. Recording rates are based on the number of sessions already captured in a 24-hour window. This means sample rates for Recordings compared with other tools may be different.
Over time, all Hotjar tools will be changed to use the same unit to collect and visualize data: sessions. After speaking with many of our users and customers, sessions seem to be clearer and easier to understand. Until we adopt all tools for session-based data capture, we will have a period where we have rates for both pageviews and sessions. We understand this might be a little confusing – please let us know if you have any feedback!
How do I enable continuous Recordings?
Continuous Recordings replaces Snapshots when enabling Recordings or configuring Recording settings. If you are already collecting Recordings, then you’re already capturing Recordings continuously.
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 starting Recordings and editing Recording settings.
Are Recording Snapshots still available?
Users have overwhelmingly told us that creating new Snapshots whenever one finishes is confusing, and hard work. Continuous Recordings means Snapshots are no longer needed. This also means that Snapshots will no longer be available for plans that offer Continuous capture.