The Account Owner is a team member with permissions to add/edit/delete an Organization on the Account, change Account settings, and manage plans and billing information. We recommend your Account Owner's email address is accessible to more than one person, as each Account has only one Account Owner.
Changing the Account Owner applies to the entire Account
All Organizations and Sites listed on an Account will change ownership when changing the Account Owner. If you only need to change the owner of a single Site or Organization listed on your Account, you can follow our article on How to Transfer a Site or Organization to a Different Account.
This article steps you through changing the Account Owner when:
Your Account Owner is unavailable
Resetting your Account Owner's password is the quickest way to change ownership
If your Account Owner's email address (found on your Team page) is being forwarded or is accessible to you, try logging out of Hotjar and resetting their password. If you don't receive the password reset link, your IT department may be able to restore your Account Owner's email address so you can try again.
If you've successfully reset the password, then ownership can be changed using the steps in the section below called Is your current Account Owner available?
Before starting the ownership check, visit your Sites page and make a note of the oldest Site in your Account and its Site ID. Your oldest Site can be found by looking for the lowest Site ID number on the left of the Site name.
After identifying the oldest Site and its Site ID, choose one of the following verification methods:
Upload an HTML file to your oldest Site
Create a hotjar.txt file that contains the oldest Site ID you identified above and today’s date.
The entry in the hotjar.txt file should use the format:hj=[Oldest_Site_ID]-DDMMYYYY
For example, if today was 25 December 2019 and the oldest Site ID is 123456, the entry would be:hj=123456-25122019
Upload the hotjar.txt file to the domain of the oldest Site you identified above.
For example, if Hotjar were completing an ownership check for https://hotjar.com, the uploaded file could be accessed when visiting https://hotjar.com/hotjar.txt
To finish the verification, fill out the Account Owner Unavailable form.
Add a DNS TXT entry on your oldest Site
DNS TXT entries may require help from a colleague
For DNS TXT entries, you may need to ask the person in charge of managing the hosting and domain names for your organization to complete this step. You can also refer to our guide on How to Verify my Domain using DNS TXT for more help with this.
On your oldest Site identified above, add a DNS TXT entry with the Site ID and today’s date.
The DNS TXT entry should use the format:hj=[Oldest_Site_ID]-DDMMYYYY
For example, if today was 25 December 2019 and the oldest Site ID is 123456, the entry would be:hj=123456-25122019
To finish the verification, fill out the Account Owner Unavailable form.
Your Account Owner is still available to make the change
Only the current Account Owner can make this change.
Check your Team page to see who your current Account Owner is and ensure that the new owner is already added to your Account.
The current Account Owner can make the ownership changes while logged into Hotjar. It is important to keep in mind that this change will:
- Give the new Account Owner increased team member access, allowing them to edit and access everything in the Account.
- Merge other Organizations into the Account if the new owner is already the Account Owner for a different Account.
- Not remove the old Account Owner's access to Organizations inside the Account. See our guide on revoking team member access to remove the old Account Owner's access.
- Not result in any lost data.
If the current Account Owner logs in with Google SSO, they'll need set a new password
Account Owners using Google Single Sign-On to log in will first need to set a new password to continue with this step. The Account Owner can set a password from their My Details page by clicking on Change Password.
Go to your Preferences.
Click Change Account Owner.
Enter the current Account Owner's password and agree to the terms.
Once the changes are submitted, ownership will be transferred to the new Account Owner.