A product tour is a short guided walkthrough that runs inside your product. It points at real things on your own pages, one step at a time, and waits for the visitor to follow along.
Tours live under Product Tours in the sidebar, next to Checklists.
When a tour is the right tool
Use a tour when somebody needs to do something, and the hard part is knowing where to click.
Good candidates:
Onboarding. A new user has signed up and is looking at an empty product.
A feature that moved. You redesigned a page and regular users cannot find what they used daily.
A feature nobody discovers. Something buried two menus deep that would help people if they knew it existed.
When something else fits better
A tour is a demanding format. It interrupts, it takes over the screen, and it asks for a minute of attention. Reach for something lighter when that is too much:
A post on your changelog or widget, when you are telling people something rather than teaching them. Most releases are this.
An in-app notification, when it is one sentence and does not need a walkthrough.
A checklist, when there are several separate things to do and people need to come back to them over more than one session. A checklist can start a tour for each item, so the two work together.
A knowledge base article, when it is reference material people will look up when they need it.
The honest test: if someone can act on it without being walked through your interface, it is not a tour.
What a tour is made of
A tour is a list of steps, up to 40. Each step is a card, and each card is one of three types.
Modal — a card in the middle of the screen, not attached to anything. It works on any page, which makes it right for a welcome or a closing step.
Pointer — a card anchored to a specific element with an arrow pointing at it. This is the one most steps use, and the one that makes a tour feel like a tour.
Hotspot — a small dot sitting on an element, which opens when the visitor clicks it. Quieter than the other two, because it waits to be noticed rather than interrupting.
Pointer and Hotspot steps need to know which element to attach to, so they only work on pages where that element exists. Modal steps have no such constraint.
How a tour starts
Most tours start on their own, when a visitor matches the targeting rules you set. A tour can also be set to start on demand instead — triggered by a checklist item or by your own code — which is how you attach a walkthrough to a "show me how" link in your product.
What to read next
How do I build a product tour? — creating a tour, adding steps, and anchoring them to your page.
How do I control who sees a tour and where it runs? — segments, page rules and frequency.
How do I tell if my tour is working? — completion, goals, drop-off and broken steps.
How do I use checklists? — the multi-session companion to tours.