Product Update: Self-Guided Virtual Tours
Enable prospective students to take a peek into campus life, whether on-campus or on their couch. With engaging Self-Guided Tours, students can explore your campus’ dining hall, quad, and residence halls to experience all that your institution has to offer.
In this update, we’re thrilled to make campus tours work for today’s students in today’s global climate. Self-Guided Tours bridge the gap, enabling prospective students to build those critical pre-admissions connections and institutions to achieve enrollment goals through increased inquiries and applications.
Why Self-Guided Tours?
Campus tours are critical to the decision-making process. In fact, 65% of students indicate that over all other influential factors, the campus visit was most important in decision making.
While fewer students are physically visiting college campuses these days, students are still looking for meaningful ways to learn more about colleges and universities. Similarly, we’ve heard from you – institutions need to convey the campus experience and tell a differentiating story.
Families are trying to make important decisions during this uncertain time. Our goal is to be as helpful as possible, and Guidebook provides an exciting and accessible platform for students. This is a wonderful way to introduce the warmth of our campus community and the benefits of a Centre education. –Pamela Baughman, Associate Dean & Director of Admission, Centre College
What’s New to Self-Guided Tours
Remote Mode
We’re introducing Remote Mode so you can support prospective students who visit virtually. Now, provide your remote visitors with a streamlined experience to explore your campus safely from home.
Skip to Destination
Give students more control over their tour experience with new navigation tools. This update lets students select and jump to specific stops along your tour route.
Improved Video and Website Capabilities
We know you have lots of information to share! Now you can link to additional web pages from each stop of your tour to share more. Have videos to share? Linked videos will play right within the stop.
Enhanced Tour Analytics
Self-Guided Tours provide meaningful data that can be transformed into actionable insights and leveraged to influence enrollment marketing and student outreach.
New Tours Metrics
- Tour adoption tracks the number of users who start your tour
- Average stops visited shows engagement and interest
- Tour concluding action, real-time engagement metrics that display how many students are moving along to the next step in the recruitment process
- Tour regions identify global hotspots and where your prospective students are engaging from
How Self-Guided Tours Work
Building an Engaging Tour
Create tailored tours with Builder, our content management system, and personalize your tours to include content that tells your campus story:
- Familiarize students with your campus by creating a preset route that stops at points of interest like historic buildings, athletic facilities, libraries, and more
- Create a fully branded experience with customizable images, icons, and colors
- Let your students tell the story! Add narration and imagery to each tour stop
- Include links to embed videos and websites to share more information and encourage prospective students to continue engaging
- Utilize end of tour call-to-action buttons to drive admissions
Navigating Campus with Guidebook
Exploring your tour route, students and their families experience campus life, whether on campus exploring student commons and academic buildings alone or visiting from the comfort of their own home.
- When on-campus, GPS provides step-by-step guidance
- Students can jump to stops along the route to learn more about points of interest
- iOS and Android compatible for tours on phones and tablets
Ready to learn more? Visit our support article for a more in-depth look at Self-Guided Tours.
Schedule a demo with one of our EDU product experts to learn more about adding Self-Guided Tours to your admissions strategy.
