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Tour Building Best Practices | Navless Product Documentation

The Navless Product Documentation outlines best practices for creating effective product tours by recommending concise, linear tours of 10-15 clicks with clear, action-oriented copy, consistent branding, minimal filler steps, and strategic embedding of "take a tour" CTAs to maximize user engagement, pipeline generation, deal acceleration, and onboarding efficiency.

These guidelines are not arbitrary; they're the blueprint for driving significant outcomes such as increased engagement, enhanced pipeline generation, accelerated deal closures, and streamlined onboarding processes. Ignoring these best practices risks undermining your tours' effectiveness and, ultimately, your strategic goals.

Below, we distill these practices into a clear, actionable format to ensure your Tours resonate with and captivate your audience.

Best Practices

Tour Length

  • Limit tours to 10-15 clicks-for-completion.
  • Divide longer tours into smaller segments.
  • When in doubt, stick to linear tours that progress from A to B to C. Linear tours that don’t offer branching paths typically see better completion and conversion rates.
  • Avoid filler steps without direct value (e.g., screens that just say “click this” or “then click here”).
  • Avoid “mega-tours” that try to show everything with many branching paths. Engagement data analysis proves that shorter, linear tours perform better than long, winding, exhaustive tours.

Branding

  • Ensure brand consistency across all visual elements.
  • Use contrasting backgrounds for readability.
  • Let design elements like tooltips blend into similar backgrounds (e.g., white Tourial tools on white product background).
  • Avoid having differently colored tooltips throughout the tour.

Narrative Copy & Clarity

  • Keep copy per tool between 10-25 words for clarity and brevity.
  • Make every step action and value-oriented.
  • Use the LLM (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) of your choice to help shorten up and perfect your copy.
  • Have one main tool+copy per screen, and if needed limit the number of additional Hotspot Hover steps to 1 per screen.
  • Avoid overloading steps with unnecessary information.

Implementation (Embed, Shares, Share links)

  • Implement easy-to-find “take a tour” CTAs on your website’s homepage, product pages, solutions pages, persona pages, and in your resource center (or directly embed the tours near the top of their destination-page).
  • Give sales reps 1-1 Share Links for personalized sharing.
  • Create multiple versions of your tours per channel, either with cloned tours or Share Links (e.g., one tour could have 3 versions for 1) Website 2) Display Ads 3) Social Sharing).
  • Customize your URL Slug for all Tours and Demo Centers.
  • Add Social Sharing MetaData (Title, Description, Thumbnail for Demo Centers).
  • Avoid hiding your tour below the fold of your web page or multiple clicks deep into your website navigation.
  • Publish tours with persistent CTAs and outro CTAs.
  • Avoid using the same exact tour URL/embed for different channels. We want to be able to accurately measure the performance of our tours per channel/per implementation.

Mobile Optimization

  • Design a mobile-optimized version of your desktop tour.
  • Clearly message if the tour is best (or only) available on desktop with single-screen “this tour is best viewed on Desktop” mobile responsive versions of the tour.
  • Shorten your copy as much as possible to encourage tour completion.
  • Avoid trying to include every desktop detail in the mobile version. Cut things down!
  • Avoid publishing content that has no mobile optimization. Your tooltips and modals will not display appropriately if your content has not been optimized and will create a broken experience for every buyer.

Navigation within Tour

  • Include a persistent Navigation Bar for CTAs.
  • Use intro and outro modals for starting and ending your tours.
  • When possible, indicate tour length and time investment upfront (you can use the step-counter in your tools for this!).
  • Use zooms and spotlights to guide buyers to the relevant portion of your product and cut out the background product noise.
  • Have one main tool+copy per screen, and if needed limit the number of additional Hotspot Hover steps to 1 per screen.
  • Keep your tour navigation consistent (e.g., if most of your screens have a “back” button that allows buyers to rewind the tour, make sure all of your screens include a back button).
  • Avoid excessive use of motion that can disorient users.
  • Avoid changing up your clickable elements all the time (e.g., if your first 5 screens of the tour have an optional “back” button in your tooltips, the rest of the clickable areas in your tour should also have a back button for consistency).
  • Avoid having multiple areas for progression per screen (e.g., don't have both a tooltip in one part of the screen and also a clickzone in another part of the screen that both do the same thing. Combine copy and tools so that there is a single “golden path” to progress the tour).

Reporting/Attribution

  • Embed trackable CTAs within demos.
  • Include marketing-automation-connected lead forms.
  • Append UTM parameters to external links.
  • Use MAP for comprehensive reporting on leads, pipeline, and revenue generated by Tourial.
  • Include direct scheduling CTAs via integrations with Hubspot Meetings, Calendly, and Chili Piper.
  • When using external link CTAs, do not put in your generic website RAD form URL with no way to track “oh hey that was a Tourial lead”.
  • When using integrated instant schedulers, do not use schedulers that are being used elsewhere. Make sure to associate that specific scheduling router with a Lead Source = Tourial. (e.g., you make a custom tour for one of your star sales reps and you put their Calendly link in the tour as a CTA. They use this link for all of their outbound efforts and now you likely don’t know that was a Tourial-booked demo.)

Media Content Technical Dimensions

  • Use the Tourial Chrome extension for consistency when you are able.
  • Aim for a minimum resolution of 1920 x 1080 with a 16:9 ratio.
  • Prefer higher resolutions for clarity.
  • Use a super-high PPI (minimum 200) monitor when capturing your media.
  • Avoid using imprecise methods like CMD+SHIFT+4 for screenshots.
  • Avoid settling for low-resolution images.
  • Avoid using a low PPI monitor for media capture.

Integrations

  • Integrate with tools for visitor/company identification (Warmly, Clearbit, 6sense).
  • Use chat tools (Drift, HubSpot) and analytics (Google Analytics).
  • Employ personalization and testing tools (Mutiny).
  • Include screen recording tools (Hotjar, Full Story) for deeper insights.
  • Leverage Google Tag Manager for efficient script management.
  • When making changes to a MAP form, make sure those changes are reflected in your connected Tourial forms. If a change is made in MAP and that change is not reflected in your Tourial forms, lead submissions may fail.
  • Do not neglect the benefits of integrating essential marketing and analysis tools.
  • Avoid launching tours before you’ve completed your Whitelabel Process. When the whitelabel process is complete, your tour URLs and embed codes will change, so knock those integrations out ASAP!
  • Avoid long, required form fields whenever possible. Lead quality and volume can be challenging to balance, but the more fields we require of a buyer, the fewer conversions we can expect.

This structured approach to tour creation ensures that each aspect of your Tourial is meticulously crafted to engage, inform, and convert your audience, ultimately driving your business forward.

Looking for a place to start? Here's a Tour Storyboarding Outline. Make yourself a copy and begin putting your ideas down pen to paper.

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