When creating your scenes in Circuit, adhering to best practices can help optimize your tour for the maximum engagement of your audience. These will be reflected in your analytics metrics of average session duration, views per session, and time per view. Read on to ensure your scenes are aligned with Circuit’s recommendations.
Scene Components
Within Circuit scenes, there is opportunity to create sub-pages in the form of hotspots for 360 scenes and gallery slides for gallery scenes.
In 360 scenes, having 4+ hotspots, with or without videos, see increased time on page and lower exit rates. When planning your 360 scene content, try to break down the information into 4+ hotspots that are placed around the image in either a clockwise or counterclockwise order.
Gallery scenes can have up to 20 gallery slides, but the recommendation is a maximum of 8 gallery slides to avoid high exit rates from gallery scenes.
Guidecard Components
Within each 360 scene or hotspot guidecard it is best practice to have an image or video, title, and paragraph text. Adding a button is a great way to drive conversion to a webpage that is specific to that guidecard’s content.
For each gallery slide, you will be required to add an image or video. Then having a title and paragraph text is best practice. Adding buttons in gallery slides is also a a great way to drive conversion to a webpage that is specific to that gallery slide’s content.
When possible, adding video into your 360 scene or hotspot guidecards and gallery slides has the potential to dramatically increase engagement. In a study of over 100,000 sessions on 9 high-performing Circuit tours, users spent 303.63% more time on tours and had an increase of 259% views per session when there was a video play event.
Copywriting
When creating copy for your virtual tour scenes, Circuit recommends the following best practices for optimal engagement.
Length: Keeping your text to 200 characters or less will minimize scrolling and likelihood to exit
Tone: A conversational tone can help virtual visitors to feel like they’re experiencing an personalized tour.
Point of View: Writing in second person point of view can help your visitor feel immersed in the experience and see themselves in your spaces.
The AI Writing Assistant feature in Circuit includes prompts to align your text with these best practices. Your Customer Success Specialist can assist you with any questions about this feature or how to add it to your plan.
Ready to start building your scenes?