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Month: <span>February 2021</span>
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A Virtual Tour Analytics Example

Author: Dean Katsiris
Categories: Virtual Tour

One month ago today, we released the virtual tour for the 2021 Saskatoon Hospital Home Lottery (SHHL) showhome. So it seemed a good Saturday morning project to look at the analytics and see what interesting pieces of information that we could get from the analytics that are possible with Anikio virtual tours.

Sold Out in Record Time!

I should also mention, this showhome also sold out officially yesterday! Apparently it is one of the fastest sell outs that the Home Lottery has ever had, so congratulations to them, Decora, their talented designers, builders, and suppliers, and all the Saskatoon hospitals! And good luck to everyone that supported this cause (even though we hope to win this home for ourselves!)

Traffic Heatmaps

We shared an early example of a heat map we generated for the main floor in our introduction of virtual tour analytics post, but here’s a look at the whole house. A video on how we do this is in the works, but in essence we look at the “play” events to see the number of views in each hotspot location, export it to Excel, and then scaled the view numbers to make an appropriate sized circle that we could insert onto the heatmap in Photoshop.

Heatmaps are an easy way to show user flow through a floorplan and what users are interested in. This information can be used to focus marketing efforts, make sure features are being seen and tweak the tour if needed, and in general get a feel for where and how people move through.

Feature Interest

This virtual tour included approximately 30 features where users could learn more about the feature, supplier, and installer. It serves as a way to thank suppliers that donated time, product, or both to also show some of their capabilities within the showhome. With the home closed to the public, it was especially important to have this capability.

Here is a small sample of some of these callouts:

Top 10 Features in the Home

So now that we know what we’re talking about, which features garnered the most interest? That’s easy! We just look at the clicks on the hotspots for those callouts. Here they are along with the percentage of viewers that looked to see more information about the supplier and feature:

  1. Main Floor Fireplace (5.7%)
  2. Caseta Light Panel (4.1%)
  3. Exterior Stone Work (3.2%)
  4. Kitchen Gas Range (2.7%)
  5. Front Door Pull (2.6%)
  6. Yoga Room Flooring (2.4%)
  7. Living Room Tile Work (2.4%)
  8. Garage Epoxy Floor (2.2%)
  9. Chrome Mouldings in Scotch Room (2.0%)
  10. Custom Railings (1.5%)

Rooms You Want to See at Night

Another amazing feature in this virtual tour? The ability to switch your view, any time, any where, to see the room you’re in during the day or at night. Which had us thinking, where do people most often look around and think “I’d like to see this at night or in daylight”?

Top 10 Locations to View Day and Night

  1. Exterior – Most of our exterior shots automatically morph from day to sunset to night, so no surprise here!
  2. Yoga Room – When you have a room on the rooftop with windows in 270 degrees, of course you want to look around day and night!
  3. Dining Room – The fireplace, the beautiful light fixture over the table.
  4. Foyer – This one surprised us a bit, but it is the first place most would see the day/night button appear.
  5. Kitchen – A kitchen that’s bright at night is a delight!
  6. Sitting Room – On the second floor, overlooking the living room, foyer, with lighting integration and views of the chandelier, we’re only surprised this one wasn’t 3 spots higher.
  7. Master Bedroom – Again, a prominent and unique light fixture
  8. Ensuite Bathroom – After the kitchen, the most important room to have nice lighting.
  9. Basement Living Room – Large windows and a fireplace
  10. Main Floor Patio – An exterior shot that doesn’t automatically change to night.

The most surprising thing on this list is what’s not on it… by far my favourite place to view day and night is the living room! Two stories of windows, a fireplace, chandelier and interesting lighting, if you haven’t done so, it’s worth having going back to the tour and having another look!

Where Are Viewers From?

As you’d expect, most of the viewers of a home in Saskatoon for a lottery that benefits Saskatoon-area hospitals are also from Saskatoon. But you might be surprised to know that Saskatoon only makes up about 60% of viewers. Or that more people viewed the home from Calgary or Edmonton than Warman or Martensville (the former two cities over 500 km away in a different province, the latter two both satellite cities of Saskatoon).

One great thing about virtual tours is that it gives people far and wide the ability to walk through a home at their own pace and look at whatever they please. So it’s not totally unexpected to see this home viewed from as far away as Berlin, Mazatlan, Vegas, or Chicago. A virtual tour allows for ticket sales from a much broader geography than an in-person showing would allow, whether those views are from snowbirds or traveling Canadians or curious foreigners and architecture enthusiats.

A final thought. While it’s unlikely that someone would drive from Kamloops or fly from Dubai to see this home in person, there is a positive environmental impact to viewing virtually vs driving to see it. Just looking at drives from Saskatoon, Warman, and Martensville, and ignoring other visitors, we loosely estimate a savings of over 3 metric tons of CO2. If you live in the same part of town that you work, roughly the equivalent of trading your car in for a bicycle for the year.

Top 10 Cities Viewing the SHHL Home

Top 10 Cities Viewing the SHHL Virtual Tour
Of course, most viewers of the Saskatoon Hospital Home Lottery Showhome are in Saskatoon, but a fair number come from places that wouldn’t ordinarily see the home at all.

Other Insights

Maybe you want to know how many users are on mobile vs desktop or tablet (roughly 60-40 in this case). Or Windows vs Mac (also ~ 60-40). iPhone vs Android (50-50). ROI? That one is tougher. But with a buy tickets button, in this case, you could get a rough estimate of payback. We think it’s safe to say that the tour has more than paid for itself with the number of tickets sold, speed of sell out, and the interest we’ve seen in it.

There are a lot of things we can tell from the analytics that are typical of any webpage. What’s useful to you will depend on your application. But we hope this gives some insight into the sorts of data you could extrapolate with our virtual tours!

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Start Your Virtual Tour Anywhere

Author: Dean Katsiris
Categories: Virtual Tour
Example of a media index

So, you’ve had a virtual tour created but where, oh where, should you plunk users down? At least initially? Most of the time, we favour starting just outside the main entry for detached buildings and just inside the front door for apartments and similar locations. But wouldn’t it be great if you could have users start the tour in a specific location? Here are a few examples where you might want to do this:

  1. Start a tour with day/night mode at day or night depending on the current time of day;
  2. Start a tour shot in summer/winter in summer or winter mode depending on the season;
  3. In a social media post about a home’s kitchen, let users jump right into the kitchen in the virtual tour;
  4. In an email to a client, bringing them directly to a location you’re discussing.

As you might have guessed, Anikio’s virtual tours now have the capability to link directly to a room or even trigger a hotspot or information box. How? You just have to add ?media=xx to the URL, where xx is either the name of the room (it has to be exactly what we named it) or the index number. Of course, we’re more than happy to help you with this. While we’re at it, there’s also the ability to skip the introduction when you just want to get to the tour directly.

Here is the same tour, starting in the kitchen:

And  the living room (at night):

And there’s more we can do right from the URL. All you have to do is add a ‘?’ at the end and add one or more of the below options. To add more than one option at the same time, just separate them with ‘&’.

Virtual Tour URL Options:

  • skip-loading – Skip the introduction/loading screen
  • media=xx – Start in a specific location, where xx is the index number or the exact room title
  • yaw=YAW&pitch=PITCH – Start with the camera facing a certain direction (yaw = horizontal axis, pitch = vertical axis)
  • language=LANGUAGE_CODE – On multilingual tours, start the tour in the correct language
  • and more – contact us to work on ways we can make custom loading parameters for your marketing needs!
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Bringing Analytics to Virtual Tours

Author: Dean Katsiris
Categories: Landlords,Realtors,Virtual Tour

While it was becoming increasingly important for businesses to have an online presence before the pandemic, today it is an absolute necessity. We all know the advantages of having 24/7 reach, potentially around the globe. Anikio is, at its core, a business about improving the online experience, primarily in rentals and real estate. And so we’re well acquainted with one of the largest downsides of being online: the loss of interaction with customers.

Customer Interaction on the Internet

Customer interaction on the internet – learning meaningful information on your customer’s experience with your business or products – comes from just a few mechanisms:

  1. Contact forms and chat/messenger options.
  2. Social media presence and posts.
  3. Reviews.
  4. Purchases.
  5. Analytics

For a realtor, viewings and open houses can provide important feedback that may help ultimately sell the home. But what happens when those listings increasingly become virtual, when potentially 2/3 of those who look at the listing online never decide to reach out? They don’t fill out a form, comment on social media, etc? For that, we have to rely on analytics.

That’s why we’re pleased to be able to offer tie-ins with Google Analytics for virtual tours. While we can’t show what specific people look at or think, analytics allows us to get a sense of what potential clients, over a given period of time, are looking at, what they’re interacting with, and can offer insights into what is popular or overlooked when people are touring your property.

Example of Using Analytics in a Virtual Tour

An example of using data for Google Analytics, in an Anikio tour, to see where people are going. The bigger the orange circle (hotspots on the tour), the more people are visiting that location.

Take the example above. The user starts the tour outside (therefore, the largest circle). From there, most people go through the foyer and on to the dining room. A few go up into the sky for an aerial view and ultimately end up on the rooftop patio and top floor (not shown).

Relatively few people go through the garage overhead door (to the right). Most people that look through the garage come from the mudroom, to the right of the foyer. They stand on the steps and look in but most don’t venture further. Even those that come in through the double door on the garage instead seem to bypass that middle hotspot, for the most part, and hop right up to the door to the mudroom.

Acting on Insights

If we had something we really wanted to point out in that central hotspot, we might want to make sure it was prominent, maybe remove the ability to jump over it when coming from the overhead door into the house so that more people would see that feature. As a realtor, you might spend a bit more time marketing that feature since it is being overlooked in the walkthrough.

On the other hand, you might look at where people are being most engaged in the virtual tour and spend your marketing efforts on that. In our dive into the analytics of this virtual tour, for example, we saw that more people looked to see more information about the fireplace than any other feature in the home. The fireplace was attracting a lot of attention. Promoting the fireplace on social media, it stands to reason, might also garner more attention for this listing.

Analytics for Others

What if, instead of a realtor, this tour was used for a showhome. The architect or builder might use this to get an idea of where a layout isn’t flowing well and tweak the floorplan for the next build. Or, like the realtor above, might be surprised at how much interest the fireplace is attracting and choose to incorporate that brand or style of fireplace in more designs in the future.

The insights may be very different if this had been an business such as a shop or restaurant. But the more we can learn about our customers, the more we can make sure they have the best possible experience when they’re interacting with our online businesses.

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