Category: Tutorials

Getting Familiar With The New TourVista

We’ve completely rebuilt the back-end pages for managing your TourVista account and virtual tours. Here’s a tour of the new design and features that you’re sure to love.

The Home Page

A slick new design awaits when you login to your TourVista account. The home page acts as a control panel for your entire account, showing your most Recent Tours and a nifty widget for quickly creating a New Tour.

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Video Tutorial for Posting to Craigslist Using TourVista’s New (Awesome!) Templates

If you haven’t used our new Craigslist templates, check ’em out at tourvista.com/craigslist

Here’s a detailed video tutorial that for the Craigslist newbies that goes through each step of adding your post to the appropriate real estate section on Craigslist:

Learn more about our new Craigslist templates here and see why it’s important to include more than just plain text on your listings if you want them to stand out amongst the masses on Craigslist.

How To Change the Arrow Color on Your Interactive Floor Plans

This is a really cool update that allows you to further customize your virtual tour with interactive floor plans by choosing the color for your arrows.

It’s super easy to customize the arrow colors:

Floor plans link

Step 1

Login to your account at TourVista.com and click the Floor Plan link for the tour you’d like to edit.

Setup interactive floor plans link

Step 2

Then click the link to “Connect your photos to these floor plans”

Change arrows link

Step 3

Click the “Change” link to select different color arrows for both the “on” and “off” states as shown on your interactive floor plans.

Custom arrow colors on this interactive floor plan

Step 4

Save and view your tour! Aren’t you snazzy? But of course you are 😉

Here’s a video tutorial that walks you through the above steps:

How To Auto-Play Your Photo Slideshow

Hopefully you’ve figured out that you can simply click on any photo in your virtual tour to launch the full-size photo slideshow, like this post explains.

But, did you know that you can press the SPACEBAR on your keyboard to play the slideshow automatically?  How cool is that?  We’ve even added a little notification at the top of the slideshow so your viewers know that they have this option, too.

You guessed it, pressing the spacebar again pauses the slideshow. 

Spacebar plays slideshow
Click the spacebar on your keyboard to play/pause the slideshow.

How to hide the links to your other virtual tours

If you have more than one online virtual tour in your TourVista account, these tours will be shown down the left side of your virtual tour’s dedicated web page in a section titled “My Other Virtual Tours”. While this is helpful in getting extra traffic to your other listings, sometimes it would be better to not display this list. For example, perhaps your MLS requires that no other listings are shown on your online marketing.

Here’s how to hide the links to your other virtual tours.

  1. Sign in to your TourVista account.
  2. From the My Virtual Tours tab, click on the address of the tour that you want to edit.  This will load the details page.
  3. At the bottom left, below the map, you will see a section for Other Settings. Mark the checkbox for “Do not show my other tours on this virtual tour’s dedicated web page”
  4. Click Save.

That’s it!  Now, when someone visits your dedicated web page for this virtual tour, the other tours in your account will no longer show.

Special thanks to Charlene of Indiana for this suggestion!

TourVista also offers additional customization of what shows and what doesn’t show on your virtual tours.  See this blog post for examples, such as making your virtual tours non-branded and MLS compliant.

#19 – Point Users in the Right Direction with Interactive Floor Plans

We’ve heard from some of our users that people may not know to mouseover the interactive floor plans in order to view the arrows and each respective photograph.  Leaving out this instructive text was a deliberate design decision as we wanted to keep the tour player free of unnecessary content.  However, at the same time, if a user doesn’t realize that their is an interactive floor plan and never experiences that aspect of the virtual tour, that’s an even greater loss.

So we’ve updated the TourVista source code to give the best of both worlds.  Now you can choose whether or not to show a message informing the users that they should mouseover the interactive floor plan in order to use it.  And you can even customize the message text for each of your virtual tours with interactive floor plans!

Thanks to Eric from Chicago for this suggestion.  Check out his virtual tour in Chicago’s Garfield Ridge.  As always, let us know what you think and if you have any ideas for improving TourVista, we’re listening.

#18 – Easily Transfer a Virtual Tour Between Accounts

In case you ever need to transfer a virtual tour between accounts, don’t waste your time in recreating it!  Just follow the steps outlined in this tutorial and quickly move a virtual tour from one TourVista account to another.

Note: if you are transferring a Premium virtual tour to a Free account or an account that has already used up all of its Premium virtual tours, the transferred Premium tour will be automatically downgraded to Free.  However, don’t worry about losing any of the data from the tour.  The receiving account can simply upgrade to a larger Premium plan and then upgrade the transferred virtual tour back to its Premium status.

Add a YouTube Video to Your Virtual Tour

Today we launched an update to TourVista’s real estate marketing platform that allows our Premium users to include a YouTube video on their virtual tours.  This is a fantastic enhancement and we encourage everyone to take advantage of using video for marketing their properties online.

What if I don’t have a video of each property?
No problem! Instead of a property video, many real estate agents include a short personal video.  Doing so allows them to add additional personalization to their virtual tours and helps to generate new customers.

Do I have to upload my video to YouTube first?
Yes, you do not upload your property/personal video to TourVista.  Instead, upload your video to your YouTube account, then copy/paste the YouTube video ID on to the Video page of your virtual tour, as the above video tutorial demonstrates.  If you don’t have a YouTube account, set one up — they are free and it only takes a few minutes.

Does it benefit my and/or my property to post the video on YouTube?
Yes! Absolutely!  YouTube is one of the most trafficked websites on the Internet.  Many people use the search tool on YouTube to find videos to watch.  While at this time, YouTube is not what we would consider a “real estate search portal”, it doesn’t hurt to have extra exposure for your properties and your business online.

Plus, YouTube has a world-class hosting platform and converts your videos so they can be seen on mobile browsers, too.  Add to that “video streaming” (which means you can jump to a section of the video that hasn’t downloaded yet) and there’s really no reason to not publish your videos to YouTube.

Remember, the Internet is a tool that you can use to better market your properties and your business. TourVista helps you do both!

#17 – Add Google Analytics to Your Virtual Tours!

Google Analytics to Track Virtual Tour Statistics
Google Analytics to Track Virtual Tour Statistics

We are happy to announce support for Google Analytics on TourVista’s  real estate marketing platform.  In addition to the built-in statistics that TourVista provides all user accounts, it is now possible to track your virtual tour statistics using Google Analytics.  Here’s how:

  1. Copy your Google Analytics tracking code.  It will be in this format: UA-12345678-1
  2. Login to your TourVista account and select the tour you want to track stats.
  3. Select “Analytics (Stats)” from the “This Tour” drop down menu.
  4. Paste your Google Analytics tracking code from step 1 into the field.
  5. To quickly apply the same Google Analytics tracking code to ALL virtual tours in your account, just mark the checkbox.
  6. Save.

Any tour views you get from this point on will be tracked in your Google Analytics account (although it will take a few hours for the stats to start showing in Analytics).