Understanding Tours

Explore the basics of configuring Tours with Chameleon

Tiago Mota avatar
Written by Tiago Mota
Updated over a week ago

Tours enable you to create a custom in-product experience using a sequence of Steps. Use Tours to explain a workflow or announce a new feature while helping your users accomplish key actions.

With Chameleon, you can create different types of Tours and choose who should see them and how they should be displayed for maximum impact.

πŸ‘‡ Check out an interactive demo to see how to build a welcome Tour!


Availability & Usage

πŸ” Unlimited Tours for Startup, Growth, and Enterprise

✚ Pairs well with Launchers, additional Actions


You configure your Tours fully in the Chameleon Dashboard and style them onto your application using the Builder.

Pick Tours from the left-side menu and click the "+ Create a Tour" button. In the Dashboard, you will follow a simple dropdown flow to set every aspect of your Tour, from how it looks, to when it displays or how often it should be shown to your users 😊

Let's cover the steps of configuring a Tour together.

This basically sets how you want your users to discover this Tour. You can create 3 types of Tours:

  • Announcement - invites your users to act and are not solicited by them;

  • Walkthrough - is launched by your users with the intent to learn more or solve problems.

πŸ’‘ Read this article to learn how to create the perfect Tour to achieve your product engagement goals.

β„Ή Make sure you get the goal of your Tour right from the start. You won't be able to change its type once you publish it.

Next, start by adding your Tour Steps and pick from existing Templates or start from scratch. Building and styling your Tour takes place in the Builder (download the Chrome extension here), but you can easily manage Steps from within the Dashboard. For each Step you'll have a few options:

  • Edit - Launch the Builder on this Step to edit it.

  • Duplicate - make a copy of this Step and place it as the next following Step by default (to its right).

  • Copy Step ID - Copy this step's unique ID.

  • Delete - Delete this Step from your Tour.

  • Templatize - Create a Template out of a Step

When you "Enter the Builder" the Chameleon Builder will open onto your product in a new tab so that you can fully configure the Tour's position in your product.

Once you're happy with your Tour, get back to the Dashboard. Here, you will see all the changes you made as well as specific configurations in the top corners of each Step panel.

Inside the Builder, you can set additional settings to ensure contextual discoverability:

  • Triggers such as user actions or icons for new features or changes.

  • "Click to progress" to allow users to re-engage with your Tour when they're ready.

  • Element or URL display rules for specific positioning and display control.

  • Specific button Actions to create complex user experiences.

πŸ’‘ You can continue adding Steps to your Tour from the Builder as well, from the green "+" icon in the top nav bar, or by duplicating a Step you're currently editing.

If you have your Environments set, this is where you'll choose where you want your Tour to show up.

By configuring Environments, you can effectively target your Experiences to specific groups of domains or subdomains and easily move them across your deployment pipeline.

The next step is to pick the users that will see your Tour. You can search in the drop-down menu and pick from your available Segments or choose to show it to a pre-defined audience created by Chameleon.

β„Ή Walkthroughs don't require you picking an audience, as they're triggered when users decide to start them.

You can also create a new Segment right then and there. Click the "Create new Segment" button and you will go to the Segments page to define a new one. πŸ˜‰

πŸ’‘ You can also configure a control group from your audience who will not receive the Tour in order to measure its impact. Read this article to learn more about A/B Tests.

πŸ” A/B Testing is only available for our Growth and Enterprise plans. Contact us if you're interested in this feature and we'll help you find the best solution for your team.

Making sure your Tour is contextual and non-intrusive is a best practice when it comes to efficient product guidance. But there are cases when you'll want to repeat them. You can set when and often a Tour should repeatedly display to your users. Tours can be set to recur:

  • After the next page load,

  • Immediately after being exited or completed,

  • Time-based, such as every week, month, or year.

  • After users perform specific events

β„Ή A Tour's Recurrence will not overtake your Dismiss options, as users will still be counted in the Tour when they dismiss or snooze it.

Goals do not need to be set to continue to publish your Tour, but we recommend you do, as they are the best way to measure the success of your Tours.

From the Dashboard, you can pick the Tour completion as a goal, or use an event that you send to Chameleon. Choose an event that you would like your Tour to impact so that it can be tracked and you can understand whether the user acted upon completing the Tour.

This way, you can assess how your Tour is performing from the Chameleon Dashboard by leveraging the different data visualizations provided there, particularly the Goals section.

πŸ‘‰ Read this article, to learn more about setting goals and measuring the success of your Tours.

πŸ” Tracking Tour conversion using Goals is only available for Growth accounts. If you want to use this feature, get in touch with us to discuss the best options for you.

When you're done building your Tour and you're ready to go live, you have a few options to ensure you deliver your Tour at the right time. You can choose to:

  • Publish immediately: Tour is immediately live for all targeted users

  • Schedule publishing: set a date and time for Tour to start being displayed.

  • Set end date: set a date and time for the Tour to stop being shown to your users; the Tour will switch to a Draft.

πŸ’‘ If your Tour isn't showing up as expected, use the Debugger console tool to see detailed information about its configurations and solve the issue. You can also review this article for common Tour issues.

Whenever you want to make changes to a live or drafted Tour you can easily do so, just make sure you apply your edits so users get to see the final version too.

πŸ‘‰ Learn more about the ways you can review changes for live Experiences.

β„Ή Chameleon only displays one Tour at a time. If you have multiple Tours set up, they will be shown in sequence based on their configuration and targeting settings. Learn more about controlling their Tour priority.


Once your Tour is Live, Chameleon will collect all user interaction data. You can then view the results in your Chameleon Dashboard or within your analytics integrations.

πŸ‘‰ Read this article to know which data Chameleon collects and learn more about analyzing your Experiences' performance.

β„Ή In case you want to reset the data associated with a Tour, the best way is to create a copy of the Tour and remove the old one. This new Tour will have no history and can be shown to any targeted users (even if they have seen the original Tour it was duplicated from).


Tooltips are essentially single-Step Tours that are anchored to a specific element and give more insight when triggered by your users. Here's how to create a Tooltip using Tours:

  1. Add a Step and configure it in the Builder

  2. Set its position anchored to an element (the element you want to position this Tooltip adjacent to)

  3. Add a pointer, giving even more context into the specific functionality you're explaining.

  4. Add an on-page trigger, from the Display Rules section, and select the option you want -- you can show it when a user hovers/clicks on that or another element or on an icon adjacent to an element.

  5. Once you return to the Tour configuration in the Dashboard, set the Recurrence to 'Repeat immediately' -- this means that as soon as your Tooltip is completed, it will be available for users to see again when they trigger it.

Some advantages of creating Tooltips using Tours in Chameleon:

  • All the customizability that Tours have, in case you need more control.

  • You can define goals and track the success of your Tours.

Some things to keep in mind when creating Tooltips this way:

  • Only one Tour can appear open at a time.

  • If you open one Tour Step trigger, the rest will disappear.

  • The Tour will not close on hover-off.

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