How to Automate Hotjar

Hotjar shows what visitors did on the page and what they said about it

Web analytics can say that half the visitors left the delivery step; Hotjar is where a team goes to see why. Heatmaps show where people clicked and how far they scrolled, recordings replay single sessions, and surveys ask questions on the page itself.

The plans follow that split: Observe covers heatmaps and recordings, Ask covers surveys, and Engage runs user interviews. A UX designer checks a new layout in Hotjar, and an agency's conversion specialist keeps one Hotjar site per client.

Hotjar has been part of Contentsquare since 2021, and the two products have now merged. New users sign up to Contentsquare, and existing Hotjar accounts are moving across in phases that began on 26 August: each gets 30 days with both running, then switches to Contentsquare's Growth plan unless the account owner opts out.

Survey replies land in one inbox and the recordings behind them go unwatched

The checkout survey collects replies all day, and most mornings the product manager skims them in Hotjar's daily summary email. An angry reply about a coupon code that would not apply sits between two compliments. Hotjar can show whether that response came from a recorded session, but finding the recording and watching it is a separate job.

The designer filters recordings for rage clicks on the new pricing page and watches the first few. A bug turns up, so she creates a Jira issue from the recording and types in the browser and the steps. The ecommerce manager wants to know whether the drop on the delivery step matches the unfinished orders in Shopify, which means another tab and a spreadsheet.

The move adds a list of its own. Heatmaps, recordings, funnels, dashboards and saved analyses stay in Hotjar, read-only for 90 days after the switch and then deleted, while surveys and feedback travel to Contentsquare. Integrations have to be reconnected there.

Hotjar sees the session, not the order or the support ticket behind it

On every Observe plan, Hotjar's Jira integration creates an issue from a recording, a console error, a survey response or a highlight. On the Business and Scale plans, the Slack integration forwards survey responses and pushes recordings from a chosen segment, and responses can also go to a Microsoft Teams channel through a webhook.

AI analysis gives each text answer a positive, neutral or negative sentiment, tags it and writes a summary of the responses. Hotjar also emails a daily survey summary, and every Monday a roundup of activity across heatmaps, recordings, feedback and surveys.

Each of these passes Hotjar's own data along. Webhooks, Zapier or the Hotjar API can send a response elsewhere, but matching it to the Shopify order that failed, or to the help desk ticket from the same customer, is a lookup someone builds or does by hand, and each Jira issue is still filed one recording at a time. After the move, Contentsquare supports neither webhooks nor Zapier, and it creates no Jira issues from Session Replay.

An angry survey reply reaches the checkout team with its recording and order

Yesterday's negative replies from the checkout survey reach the team that owns checkout before stand-up, each beside its recording, the order in the shop that never completed and any help desk ticket from the same email address. The worst few also go to the team lead by text.

Every Monday, recordings with rage clicks or U-turns on the pages changed in the last release come back as draft Jira issues, each naming the page, the browser and the release, for a developer to file or close. The drafts carry on after the move, when Contentsquare stops filing Jira issues from replays.

The ecommerce manager's delivery-step question gets a sheet of its own: last week's recordings that ended on the delivery step, set against the abandoned checkouts Shopify shows for the same days.

For an account inside its 30-day window, the team works from one checklist: each saved heatmap, recordings segment and highlight by site and date, the integrations to reconnect in Contentsquare, and the Contentsquare cookies the consent banner does not list yet.

One visitor's story spans Hotjar, the shop admin and the help desk

Matching one survey reply to its recording, its order and its support ticket takes four tabs for a single visitor. WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. When the account moves, the same Hotjar login opens Contentsquare, and the reading carries on there.

Nothing a visitor sees changes: surveys, their targeting and the tracking code are left alone, Jira issues arrive as drafts for a developer to file, and no customer is contacted.

With the 30-day window running, the move checklist is the job to start this week.