Choosing the right Tour type

Understand the differences between showing a Tour automatically or manually and the best practices surrounding each option.

Pulkit Agrawal avatar
Written by Pulkit Agrawal
Updated over a week ago

An important aspect of creating Chameleon Tours is selecting the Tour Type that compliments your users' behavior and your product goals. This sets whether your Tours will show automatically to your users, or they will self-serve these Tours manually from a Launcher, hyperlink, etc.

πŸ‘‰ This is the updated Delivery Method that we had before for Tours: Automatic Delivery is now an Announcement Tour and Manual Delivery refers to Walkthrough Tours.


The Tour type dictates the philosophy and mindset of your Tours, and you should use both methods very distinctively. With Chameleon, you can create:

  • Announcement Tours - which are shown automatically to users.
    Analogous to sending an email to a user, these are not directly solicited and are the product's attempt at encouraging the user towards an action that they will find useful or valuable.Β They display based on the Segment and different rules you set.

  • Walkthrough Tours - they are displayed manually once a user starts them.
    Similar to a help article that a user seeks out and reads. A user has a clear intention and is motivated to invest effort in learning more to accomplish their objective.Β 

    Emails and help articles have very different formats -- different lengths, different styles, and different designs. Emails require heavy testing and analysis to be successful, whereas with articles it's easier to know if they resolved the user's questions.

🀝 Consider your users' needs and use the Tour Type that's more likely to act on both your goals and their challenges.


For every Tour you create, you'll have to select its type as the first step during configuration. This is a straightforward step and the first you'll go through, before publishing your Tour.

πŸ‘‰ You will not be able to change the Tour type after it has been published. If you want to use another type, you can create a new Tour

This Tour type shines when you want to drive user awareness and product discovery.

When you create an Announcement Tour, it will appear to the user if they fall into the target audience and all conditions for the first step are met (e.g. page URL, element requirement, user action, etc.).

Once you choose the Announcement type, you can configure its behavior from the Dashboard. And style it to blend with your interface seamlessly using the Builder.

🎯 With the Growth Plan, you also have access to experimentation, allowing you to exclude a control group (randomly sampled from the target audience) from a Tour to measure the effectiveness of a specific Tour vs. nothing. Get in touch with us if you'd like to benefit from this feature.

πŸ‘‰ Learn more about A/B Testing within Chameleon.

This Tour type does a great job of teaching users a workflow.

When you pick a Walkthrough Tour, it means that you can let a user choose to start this Tour at their convenience in various ways. This way they can launch the Experience whenever they're ready. Ready to learn, or to perform further actions. πŸ˜‰

Once you pick the Walkthrough Tour type from the Dashboard, you have a few methods to share it with your users:

  • Tour Links
    Each Walkthrough Tour will have a unique URL query parameter you can add to any URL and share in an email, blog post, help article, etc. Your users can use it to start the Tour remotely. This is a great way to bring users into your product using an external context. Learn more about using Tour Links.

πŸ’‘ You can also set buttons to trigger other Tours or Microsurveys. Read this article to learn more about the different "Actions" users can launch from buttons.


The analytics for the different Tour types in Chameleon will be slightly different. But we recommend you set a Conversion Goal for both, so you can track how effective the Tour was in achieving your target.Β 

🎯 You can also use Microsurveys to measure a user's satisfaction on how effective your Tour was or how happy they are with the underlying product functionality. 


We put together a list of best practices to have in mind when creating Announcements or Walkthrough Chameleon Tours.
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For Announcement Tours:

  • Think of these as in-product ads or experiments for features.

  • Keep them down to 1 or 2 Steps.

  • Focus on increasing a user's motivation to explore further.

  • Avoid being intrusive or blocking a user's workflow.

  • Give users the option to launch a more detailed Walkthrough Tour from a button if they are interested in a deep dive.

  • Target users based on who they are or what they've done to increase relevancy.

For Walkthrough Tours:

  • Break these into separate, short workflows (keep them close to 6 steps).

  • Prioritize based on where users are most confused or where help articles are least effective.

  • Link to more information via button actions as necessary.

  • Create different Launchers for different use cases and pages.

πŸ‘‰ Learn more about delivering in-product experiences from our Best Practices Academy.

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