From Friday July 1, 2022 we're moving accounts that were created before April 20, 2022 to our updated pricing model.
Under the updated pricing model, we've grouped Surveys and Feedback into a separate product called Ask that’s priced based on the number of responses you want to collect across Surveys and Feedback. Heatmaps and Recordings will be grouped into a separate product called Observe and will still be priced based on the number of daily sessions.
Both products, Observe and Ask, will have the Basic (free), Plus, Business, and Scale plans available, and the selected plan can be different for each product.
See the Updating our pricing model blog post for all the details on this update.
Hotjar Events and User Attributes allow you to do similar things, which can lead to Events being used for goals that would be better achieved through User Attributes and vice versa. This article is designed to help you understand the difference between Events and User Attributes, and help you choose the feature that best suits your needs.
Overview of Events and User Attributes
Events
Events represent the occurrence of something, such as an action or a change that happened on a page. Nearly everything a person does on the web is tied to an event; clicks, scroll, mouse movements, typing, drag and drop, zoom, etc. Some common occurrences that Hotjar Events are used to track include; Users clicked on a button, spent x seconds on a page, saw x variant when visiting an A/B test page, encountered a specific error, etc.
If you want to react to a change or action triggered by a user, and don't need to store that action against specific users in the future, or use it to trigger other actions later, you can use Hotjar Events.
User Attributes
User Attributes are data points related to your users, and they can help to tell the history of your users. They describe what your users have done historically by assigning 'attributes' to the users themselves, rather than just documenting an occurrence within a single session. If you need to keep track of user data over time, including individual user data, and make decisions based on that data, User Attributes are the way to go. These attributes may change over time, but are not bound to a specific session. Some common examples of User Attributes include; email_address, company, name, last_purchase_date, subscription status, on-trial, etc.
To find things like; the date someone signed up to your site, the last time they signed in, how much they have spent on your product, whether or not they have used a specific feature of your site in the past, etc., User Attributes will be the best option.
Primary differences of Events and User Attributes
| User Attributes | Events |
| User Attributes require additional Privacy Considerations and your company might require you to sign a DPA with us. It is possible to store Personally Identifiable Information (PII) with User Attributes. | Events don't require additional Privacy Considerations beyond our Acceptable Use Policy and that of your company. It is not possible to store PII with Events |
| User Attributes can trigger feedback tools and be used as filters for Recordings and Heatmaps. They're included in Survey exports, and Recording list exports. | Events can trigger Recordings and Feedback tools. They can also be used as filters for Recordings and Heatmaps. |
| User Attributes store data against specific users, they can single out a user, and potentially identify them. | Events don't store data against specific users, only general data that applies to all users which triggered the Event. |
| User Attributes can do things that require previous knowledge of your users, for example, if you store an attribute called signupDate as a User Attribute, you can use User Attributes as triggers based on that stored attribute. | Events can't do things that require previous knowledge of your users, unless you store that data on your site directly and read from it when you need it. |
| User Attributes enable User Lookup features, allowing the deletion of individual user data as required by some Privacy laws such as GDPR. | Events don't enable User Lookup features and they're not tied to specific users. Deleting an Event call from your site will prevent it from being attached to any subsequent sessions. |
| User Attributes are a bit more complex to setup, they require you to pull data from your database or dataLayer, properly formatting the data, and are stored only when the user session is captured. | Events are simpler to setup, as they don't require more data than what's on the browser at the time the Event fires (a click happens on the browser and can be listened easily with an Event Listener). |
| We recommend firing User Attributes on every page of the flow you're tracking, and some use cases will require you to fire them on every page. | Events only need to be fired on the page you want them to act. |