Hotjar should capture the majority of user sessions on your site. We cannot guarantee that a specific user will be tracked.
To know why users are not being captured, it is important to understand potential traffic and traffic coverage:
- Potential traffic is made of visits to your site that Hotjar could capture. There are a variety of technical reasons why someone may fall outside this type of traffic.
- Traffic coverage describes the total rate of sessions captured from your potential traffic. Your Hotjar plan determines if someone falls outside of traffic coverage.
Why might a session fall outside of potential traffic?
Hotjar does its best to collect data from all the users coming to your site. There are a variety of technical reasons why Hotjar may be unable to, often based on your users' own browser preferences.
We have no way of saying how many users this affects on your site because we can't track them.
Here are all the known reasons why Hotjar may not track someone. They may:
- Use a browser we do not support.
- Have JavaScript disabled.
- Have cookies disabled. See what cookies Hotjar stores.
- Have disabled Hotjar from our Do Not Track page.
- Have Do Not Track enabled in their browser.
- Have accessed your site via a private/incognito browsing mode. These often block cookies or tracking scripts.
- Have disabled use of localStorage or sessionStorage
- Use browser plugins that disable tracking scripts such as Hotjar. This can include ad-block or privacy-enhancing extensions. As many as 30% of internet users have ad-block or similar software installed.
- Access your site from a private or public network that restricts access to Hotjar's servers. Rarely, this is due to local legal restrictions on certain types of network traffic.
Although rare, there may also be other technical reasons their visit may have not been captured:
- A WebSocket was not opened during the visit. This is often due to the use of Content Security Policies that block one from opening. You can configure this on your servers.
- Network conditions such as loss of connectivity can cause data loss. If this happens, the user's session data may be discarded.
Why might someone fall outside traffic coverage?
There are a few settings inside Hotjar which may exclude a specific user. They are:
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Hotjar has sampled your traffic.
If your potential traffic exceeds your plan limits Hotjar will only capture some of your potential traffic. We call this sampling. The exact method of sampling varies depending on your plan and tool.
Heatmaps, Funnels, Forms, and Recordings for Basic and Plus plans use pageview sampling. Learn more about pageview sampling.
Business users use session sampling for Recordings. Learn more about session sampling
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You have enabled "Click & Scroll" or "Only 30s+ sessions" during Recording setup.
These settings help you avoid low-value Recordings. Enabling them often explains differences in traffic compared to other sources. This might include Google Analytics, ad software analytics, or your server logs.
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The user may not have visited a page you are targeting.
Learn more about:
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You have their IP blocked within your Hotjar settings.