Virtual Tour Best Practices 2024

Today, engaging the attention of potential customers and website visitors is more crucial than ever. Virtual tours are a powerful tool in this landscape, offering a unique way to explore a property, venue or business remotely.

This guide dives into some simple virtual tour best practices to maximise the effectiveness of your virtual tour. We’ll cover the art of strategically embedding virtual tours on to your website to not only capture but to retain the attention of your audience. We’ll also look at leveraging data-tags to enhance your virtual tour, how to use social media to drive more traffic to your virtual tour and how to best use some of the accompanying images and video you’ll receive from us.

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting out, this guide to virtual tour best practices will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to use virtual tours effectively. Let’s dive in and explore how to transform your virtual tour from a simple digital feature into a powerful engagement tool.

Embedding A Virtual Tour On Your Website:

Studies have shown, having a piece of interactive content like a virtual tour on your website or landing page can increase conversions by as much as 80%, and increase the time spent on page by as much as 260%! To make sure you’re getting the maximum benefit, It’s critical that visitors can easily find and engage with your virtual tour when they land your website.

We recommend, where possible, giving your virtual tour its own section on the website. It’s also good to give this section a title and short description explaining what the visitor is about to engage with.

Virtual_Tour_Best_Practices_Embedding — To make sure you’re getting the maximum benefit, It’s critical that visitors can easily find and engage with your virtual tour when they land your website.

Rather than posting a hyperlink or using a button to open your virtual tour, it’s important to use the iframe code provided to embed your virtual tour on your website. Now a visitor can explore your virtual tour without being directed away from your webpage. Making the virtual tour function as a tool to keep the viewer engaged with your site.

If you need any assistance embedding your virtual tour on your website please reach out to our team. We’re happy to help or liaise with your web developer to ensure your virtual tour is generating the maximum return on investment.

Effectively Using Tags

Data-tags are, without a doubt, one of the best ways to get the most out of your virtual tour. Data-tags are great for adding additional context, drawing attention to features that may not be immediately obvious and bringing life to your virtual tour.

Tags can contain a variety of media, including text, images, audio, and video. Therefore, they can be a great way to gain additional benefits from any existing content you may already have.

The virtual tours that get the best results from their tags are the ones that have a good variety in the content their tags contain. Having a mix of text, images and video is a great way to keep a visitor engaged while they explore your space.

A key question with tags is ‘how many tags should I add to my virtual tour?’. Well, the only real answer is ‘it depends’. Adding a lot of tags in a smaller space may become a bit overwhelming for a user, where as having lots of tags spread out across a larger space can act as breadcrumbs to encourage a visitor to keep exploring.

Virtual_Tour_Best_Practices_Tags — Tags can contain a variety of media, including text, images, audio, and video.

However, we would always recommend aiming to add at least add a couple of tags to your tour. Tags also can be added, removed or amended at any time. Our team can always help you add more content if you think of anything else once your virtual tour is live.

If you’re unsure about what content you have might that work best, or if you have too many or too few tags, our experts at Scene3D are also on hand to advise when it comes to data-tags.

Sharing the your virtual tour:

Similar to a website, virtual tours are hosted online. This means sharing your virtual tour is really easy, the virtual tour URL is a link that can be shared in a message via text, email, WhatsApp or Facebook messenger.

If you have your virtual tour embedded on your website or landing page, you may wish to share a link to that page so a viewer can benefit from the additional information on that web page. However, there are also times where you may wish to share a link directly to the virtual tour. This way the recipient can open the link and start exploring straight away. All you need to do is share the virtual tour URL we provide when we deliver your finished virtual tour.

Using social media is another great way to drive traffic to your virtual tour. Right now, it’s not possible to embed the virtual tour directly in social media platforms but you can post a link to your virtual tour in the caption. As part of the deliverables Scene3D provides, we include a ‘virtual tour teaser video’. This is a great piece of content to post with a link to the virtual tour as it offers a visual preview of the full virtual tour, leveraging your existing social media audience and driving more traffic to your virtual tour.

Using Your Virtual Tour Images:

When shooting your virtual tour, the 3D camera will also take a variety of pictures of each area of your space. These images are equivalent to 4K quality and are wide angle shots, perfect for showing a property, venue or business.

Virtual_Tour_Best_Practices_Images — Virtual tour camera images are equivalent to 4K quality and are wide angle shots

At Scene3D we curate and provide these images to you in two formats: High resolution and web resolution. The high resolution images work great for any print media such as brochures, fliers or leaflets. The web resolution images, as the name would suggest, are perfect for using on your website or social media. The web images are compressed to be a smaller file size while maintaining as much quality as possible, so they don’t slow down your page load speeds.

Start Location Spreadsheet:

For larger or more complex virtual tours, our team will provide a ‘start locations spreadsheet’, as part of the deliverables you’ll receive.

On the spread sheet will be list of virtual tour links and embed codes. Each of these allows you to have the virtual tour start / open at different places in your property or business. This means you can use the same virtual tour in a variety of different ways on your website.

For example, a hotel may wish to have their virtual tour start at the main entrance on the homepage, start at the restaurant on the book a table page and start at the honeymoon suite on the page to book that room. This way, rather than having to navigate from the main entrance up to the room or restaurant in the virtual tour, a visitor can immediately view the room they’re interested in.

This also makes it easier to direct people to the right place when sharing the virtual tour. For example, a large commercial office with different spaces available for rent want to quickly send a prospect to the specific office they’re interested in. By sharing the relevant start location URL from the spreadsheet, the prospect will open the virtual tour exactly where they need to be.

Virtual Tour Best Practices Conclusion:

So there you have it, our guide to “Virtual Tour Best Practices – Maximise Your R.O.I.”. Let’s reflect on the key takeaways to make sure you’re getting the full potential from your virtual tour.

The strategic placement of virtual tours on your website is key to make sure they’re easily accessible and engaging. Embedding them using iframe codes directly into your webpage enhances user experience, keeping visitors on your site and engaged.

Data-tags play an essential role, adding interactivity and context to your virtual tours. These tags help in maintaining viewer engagement and bringing attention to specific features of your space. Virtual tours perform best when their tags have a variety of media, including text, images, audio, and video.

Leveraging social media platforms can drive significant traffic to your virtual tours. Use the teaser video and images provided to visually entice prospects while posting direct links to your virtual tour in the post caption.

Finally, for larger and more complex spaces, the use of a ‘start locations spreadsheet’ allows for more direct navigation within your virtual tour, sending visitors to specific areas of interest. This personalisation improves the overall user experience of your virtual tour across different web pages. Making sure your virtual tour serves as an impactful and versatile tool across your whole website.

If you’d like to learn about virtual tour pricing, check out our Virtual Tour Pricing Article.

Contact Our Team Here to speak to one of our virtual tour experts.