Hotjar explained: heatmaps, recordings and surveys

If Tag Explorer has shown you a Heatmap and replay card with a plain number as its title, that is Hotjar. It is a behaviour analytics and feedback tool, and it is on your site to answer a question your analytics cannot. Paste your page into Tag Explorer to see this tag on your own site.

GA4 counts. It tells you a page had visitors and that a small number of them enquired. Hotjar shows what the rest of them did instead: which parts of the page they clicked, how far they scrolled, where they stalled, and, if you ask them, what stopped them. Watching and asking are two different capabilities, and Hotjar is one of the few tools that does both.

What it actually does

Heatmaps aggregate many visits into a single picture of one page. Click maps show what people press, including things that are not links. Move maps track cursor travel as a rough proxy for attention. Scroll maps show how far down the page people get, which is the fastest way to find out that your enquiry form sits below the point where nearly everyone stops.

Recordings replay individual sessions: mouse movement, clicks, scrolling, page changes, rage clicks and errors. They are reconstructions of the interaction, not video of the visitor’s screen.

Surveys and feedback widgets are the part that separates Hotjar from a pure replay tool. A survey can appear on a chosen page, after a chosen delay, or when somebody moves to leave, and ask a direct question. A feedback widget lets a visitor rate a page and point at the specific element that annoyed them. That is qualitative data you cannot infer from behaviour at all, and it is often where the real answer comes from.

What the ID means

Hotjar identifies your site with a numeric site ID, carried in the snippet as hjid and repeated in the URL the script is loaded from on static.hotjar.com. There is no prefix and no hyphen, which makes it visually distinct from almost every other tag on your page.

You will also see hjsv in the snippet. That is the snippet version, not an account identifier, and it changes when Hotjar updates the loader. It is not something you choose.

Your own site ID is listed next to the site address on the Sites screen in your Hotjar account. Match it against what a scan reports. If they differ, your site is feeding a Hotjar account that is not the one you log into, which is a very common outcome of an agency handover.

Hotjar documents the snippet and the Tag Manager route in its tracking code installation guide.

Session allowances, sampling and what you will not see

This is the part that causes the most false alarms. Hotjar plans carry a session allowance, and once the allowance for a period is used up, no further sessions are captured until it resets. A quiet-looking page may simply have missed the sample.

So before you decide the tag is broken, check usage in your account. A missing recording is weak evidence. A tag absent from a scan is strong evidence. The two get confused constantly, and only one of them needs fixing.

Recordings and heatmaps also depend on people reaching the page with the script allowed to run. Where consent rules apply to your traffic, Hotjar normally sits behind your consent platform, which means visitors who decline are not recorded at all. That is a working setup rather than a fault, and it is worth knowing before you go hunting for one.

On privacy, Hotjar suppresses form input values by default: a recording shows that a field was completed without exposing the contents. You can suppress further elements deliberately, and on any page handling personal or payment details you should. Anything you unsuppress becomes visible to every person with access to the account, indefinitely.

What this looks like in Tag Explorer

Tag Explorer draws your page as a tree. Each Tag Manager container is a branch, the tags inside it are leaves underneath it, and anything hard coded into the page HTML sits under DIRECT ON PAGE.

Hotjar appears as a Heatmap and replay card with the numeric site ID as the card title and the tag type as the subtitle. The info icon opens a short definition and the Learn more link that brought you here.

Where the card sits is the useful signal. Under a container means the tag can be changed without touching the site’s code. Under DIRECT ON PAGE means it is in the template or injected by a plugin, so changing it is a developer job. Under both means it is installed twice, and the tool will raise a duplicate banner and tint the affected cards red with an attention badge.

Two limits apply. The public container file never contains the human names you gave your tags, only the tag type and the tracking ID, so a scan cannot tell you a tag is called “Hotjar, old account”. And the tool reads the published container only, so a Hotjar tag sitting in an unsubmitted Tag Manager workspace will not appear at all. A scan proves Hotjar is installed, not that it fired. To prove firing, open the page with the browser DevTools Network tab and watch for the request to static.hotjar.com, or simply look for your own visit in the account.

What to do if it is missing, duplicated or dead

Missing. No Hotjar card means nothing is being observed on that page, and behaviour data is not retrospective: a week with no tag is a week you can never look at. Check the tag exists in your container, that its trigger covers every page rather than the homepage alone, and that the container version was published. Then rescan a second page, ideally a landing page or a form page, since those are the ones worth watching.

Duplicated. Two cards with the same site ID means two copies of the script are loading, which adds weight to every page view and can double count sessions against your allowance. Keep one copy, and prefer the Tag Manager copy because it is the one you can change without a developer. Two cards with different site IDs is a bigger problem: the site is splitting its behaviour data across two accounts, so no heatmap is complete. Decide which account you actually use, keep that ID, and remove the other.

Dead or stale. Hotjar is current, so no Hotjar tag is dead by age. The stale pattern is a site ID belonging to an account nobody on your side can open, usually left behind by a previous agency, still recording your visitors somewhere you have no rights. Open an account you control, swap the ID, and treat the old recordings as gone. The other quiet stale case is a tag running on a plan that expired: the script still loads, the account collects nothing, and the page pays for it on every view. If nobody has logged in for a year, that is the first thing to check.

Related guides

• Microsoft Clarity explained: free heatmaps and replays
• Google Analytics 4 explained
• GTM containers explained
• Form submission event listeners explained
• Custom HTML tags explained

If you want to know whether your Hotjar is installed once, twice, or into an account you cannot open, run the page through Tag Explorer and read the site ID off the card. When the recordings keep showing the same failure on the same page, the fix is the page rather than the tooling, which is where our rebuilds and rescues work picks it up.