User Attributes FAQs

Your User Attributes page in-app allows you to see what attributes have been sent to Hotjar, and what value types each attribute has. If you’re familiar with using your web browser’s developer tools, you can also confirm User Attributes are being successfully sent and received by Hotjar by following the steps below.

Enable Hotjar debug logs in your browser console.

Open the page where you want to test the User Attributes and add the ?hjDebug=1 parameter to the end of the URL. Here are a couple of examples of what it might look like:

https://www.example.com/?hjDebug=1
OR
https://www.example.com/?utm_1234&hjDebug=1

Open your browser console.

If you're not familiar with your browser developer tools, or the console, check this guide to learn how to open your browser console.

Send the attribute manually.

To send a User Attribute manually, add the Identify API code in your browser console and press Enter or Return on your keyboard. If the Identify API call was successful, you'll see a confirmation log similar to this:

We also recommend that you go through the steps that your user would, to ensure that the Identify API call is being sent organically on each page. If the API call is sent automatically, then you'll know that your code is implemented successfully.

If the same Identify API call is detected when sent manually, but not automatically when testing the user journey, then you may need to revisit your code and ensure that the Identify API code is being added to all the pages you plan to track.

Since sending attributes using the Identify API relies heavily on custom code, it is not something that Hotjar support can assist with. Our recommendation is to send the Identify API Reference to your web developer and have them implement the feature on your site.

When disabling User Attributes, any Hotjar tools relying on User Attributes for targeting and triggering will be disabled. You'll need to change the targeting settings of any affected tools to start triggering again without depending on User Attributes.

To prevent User Attributes from being sent in the future, we recommend removing the code relating to User Attributes from your site. After deletion, previously collected User Attributes will still exist but no longer be updated or added to new users to your site.

Disabling User Attributes requires Admin-level permissions.

Visit your User Attributes settings page.

Select the site you would like to disable User Attributes on and click Disable User Attributes.

Clicking the button will block further calls to the API.

User Attributes can be deleted from the User Attributes management page by clicking on the trash can icon to the right of the attribute. Only team members with 'Read & Write' permissions or higher can delete User Attributes.

When an attribute is deleted, it will immediately disappear from the Hotjar application. However, the attribute is still stored in the back end for 7 days before being permanently deleted. Data associated with the attribute is ignored during the 7-day period. This is to prevent data from being sent due to caching issues.

If you wish to re-create an attribute that was deleted, you'll need to wait 7 days before the attribute can be re-created successfully.

No, it's not necessary. User Attributes are session-based. On each page load, User Attributes sent throughout the session are reevaluated to determine whether the targeting for a survey applies.

Currently, we don't have an integration with Google Analytics that allows you to send User Attributes to Hotjar. We do have an integration with Segment, which allows you to install Hotjar and send customer data over Hotjar's Identify API without additional code. See our Using Hotjar with Segment article for more details. You can also send User Attributes to Hotjar via Google Tag Manager, visit our How to Send User Attributes with Google Tag Manager article for the steps on setting this up.

Yes, you can send up to 100 unique user attributes on any Hotjar site, with any number of users able to be associated with those attributes.

Currently, User Attributes are only visible in on-site Survey responses when they’re downloaded and aren’t visible on the Survey page in-app.

You must be on an Ask Business or Scale plan in order for User Attributes to be included in your Survey data exports. If you're on Ask Basic and upgrade to Ask Business or Scale after you've already collected responses, the attributes won't be associated to those prior responses retroactively. Survey responses received after the upgrade to Ask Business or Scale will have attributes associated to them.

Link survey responses that are downloaded will not include responses as this type of survey is hosted by Hotjar, meaning your User Attribute code won’t be present on the Link survey page.

If your survey has been active for a few days and you’ve not received responses it’s worth checking the following:

• The User Attributes that you're sending have matching types and values.

  The available types of attributes you can send include Strings (text characters), Numbers, Dates, Booleans (true/false).

• Attributes with a Number type only include numeric characters.

  If you're sending an attribute with a Number type, but the value includes non-numeric characters, the Identify API call will fail.

The sequence involved when a survey with User Attribute targeting is active is:

1. Check to see if the URL matches.
2. Check the existing User Attributes. If the don’t match, listen for an Identify API call (this is what sends Hotjar User Attributes).
3. The API call will trigger a check to see if Hotjar needs to show a survey.
   • If an attribute matches the target criteria, it will show. (For Surveys, you should keep in mind the Survey's persistence/behavior settings).
   • If the targeting also relies on a JavaScript event, Hotjar will wait for the event to fire before displaying the survey.
4. Once the page changes, the survey will go away, and the cycle starts again.

User Attributes are associated with a recording at the time of processing. They will reflect the value passed to Hotjar prior to the user's session ending. They are not updated after processing.

Practically speaking, this means that if a user's attributes are updated, an older recording will reflect different values than the newer one. Let's say a customer placed purchases on both their first and second visits to your site. On both occasions, you tracked them spending 100. You have a total_customer_value attribute tracking their total value to the company. The first session will show their total value of 100. The second will show their total value as 200.

Check to see if you are trying to send an email address or other personally identifiable information (PII) to Hotjar without a User ID. If so, these calls will be blocked and the call will fail. To solve this, be sure that you only ever send PII to Hotjar when it's being associated with a unique User ID (defined in your API call).

Currently, it's not possible to target Recordings based on User Attributes. You can target based on URLs and Events only.

Hotjar requires that in using User Attributes, you abide by our terms and conditions, acceptable use policy, and accept the conditions of our data processing agreement.

User Attributes are designed to explicitly allow you to perform lookup and deletion requests, allowing you to manage user data management requests, in line with privacy legislation requirements. They do rely on you passing a user ID that can be used for user lookup, so only pass personally-identifying information if you have a user ID.

Don't do this. No, seriously, do not do this!

If you have sent User Attributes to Hotjar on a null value, Hotjar has no way of attributing this information to a unique individual via User Lookup unless they consent to connect survey responses with their email address. This is not an effective way of making sure all users who you have collected personal information about can be retrieved and deleted.

Do not send PII as User Attributes unless you have a User ID. We cannot do anything to lookup and remove this data if you do it. You would need to lookup and delete each user's data individually, or delete the site in Hotjar.