A tour that runs at the wrong moment is worse than no tour. This article covers the trigger settings that apply specifically to tours, and the patterns that work.
Two things that are different for tours
- There is no session-start event. A tour can be triggered by a Page view or by a Custom event from your own site, and nothing else.
- There is no page rules block. The Start URLs you entered when building the tour already decide which pages it may run on, using the same
*pattern matching.
Everything else — time on page, visitor rules, frequency — works exactly as it does for banners and chat messages. See Trigger rules.
Patterns that work
| Goal | Setup |
|---|---|
| Greet brand-new users the first time they arrive | Trigger: Page view, on page view. Visitor rule: Session count equals 1. Frequency: Send once. |
| Explain one screen the first time someone opens it | Start URL: the address of that screen. Trigger: Page view. Frequency: Send once. |
| Let people replay the tour from a button in your product | Trigger: Custom event with your event name, set to Always trigger so the frequency cap is ignored. |
| Only show it to customers on a particular plan | Trigger: Page view. Visitor rule: Plan equals your plan name. Frequency: Send once. |
| Wait until someone has settled on the page | Trigger: Page view. Time on page: More than 10 seconds. |
The "Take the tour" button
The most useful pattern is letting people start the tour themselves. Someone who dismissed it by accident can come back to it, and your support team can say "click Take the tour in the corner".
- Add a button or link to your product, labelled something like "Take the tour".
- Have it call Yaplet when clicked. The first argument is always the literal word
customEvent; your own name goes inname:Yaplet.trackEvent('customEvent', { name: 'start-tour' }); - In the tour's trigger settings add a Custom event rule, type
start-tour, and choose Always trigger so it runs every time rather than once per person.
Giving the page time to load
Single-page apps often render their content after the navigation finishes, so a step's element does not exist yet at the moment the tour starts. Use After page view with a delay of a second or two instead of On page view. Yaplet also retries a missing element for about two seconds by itself, so between the two most timing problems disappear.
Checking that it fired
Open the tour and click Reports. There are three tabs — Successfully sent, Failed to send and Waiting to be sent — telling you how many times the tour was delivered and what did not go out. Tours do not report completions or per-step drop-off; the report is about delivery, not progress. See Read engagement campaign analytics.
To try a tour on yourself before publishing it, use the Set up test for yourself button at the bottom of the Trigger settings panel.
What's next?
Fine-tune how often it repeats in Frequency caps, or make the steps themselves sturdier with Anchor tour steps to UI elements.