How a virtual tour keeps visitors on your website
By Charles Mansfield-Osborne ·
Most business websites have a problem: people arrive, glance at a photo or two and leave. An interactive 360° tour gives them something to do. Instead of scrolling past a picture, they look around, click into the next room, open a video or find out more. That changes how long people stay, how much of the page they see, and how many of them get in touch.
Why tours hold attention
A photo is looked at for a second or two. A tour asks the visitor to take part: drag to look around, choose where to go next, discover something. People spend time exploring spaces they are interested in, and each click tells you something about what they care about.
Tours also answer questions that would otherwise send people back to Google: how big is it, what’s it like inside, is there parking, is it accessible. Every question answered on your page is a reason not to leave it.
What to measure
In Google Analytics 4, the useful numbers are:
- Engagement rate: the share of visits that last more than ten seconds, include a key event or view more than one page. Its opposite is the bounce rate.
- Average engagement time on pages with a tour, compared with similar pages without one.
- Key events from inside the tour, such as clicks on booking, enquiry or “call us” hotspots.
Our tours can report their own events, such as scenes viewed and hotspots clicked, so you can see which rooms people explore and which buttons turn interest into enquiries. Compare pages before and after adding a tour, or pages with and without one, over a few weeks.
Does engagement help search rankings?
Be careful with anyone who promises that a tour will lift your rankings on its own. Google has said it doesn’t use Google Analytics data to rank pages. What a tour does do is make your page more useful. People who find what they need don’t go back to the search results to try someone else, and pages that answer searchers’ questions well are what Google is trying to reward. Tours also give you 360° imagery for Google Maps, and fresh, rich content for your Business Profile.
So think of engagement as the result of a better page, not a trick. The payoff you can count is enquiries and bookings.
Where to put the tour
- On the pages that sell, such as room types, venue hire, facilities or a property listing, not only on a separate “virtual tour” page.
- Above the fold or close to it, with a clear “Explore inside” prompt.
- With a fast-loading preview image, so the tour doesn’t slow the page down. Ours load a lightweight preview first and only load the panoramas when someone starts exploring.
- With calls to action inside the tour, so the visitor who is most interested can act without leaving it.
For businesses that already have a tour
If you already have a tour, but it sits on a platform page nobody visits, or it disappears if you stop paying, we can help. We can rebuild your existing panoramas into a branded, fast tour you own, embed it where it will do most good and set up tracking so you can see the effect. Ask us about re-platforming an existing tour.
See it for yourself
Explore some of our tours, then talk to us about putting one to work on your site.