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How can I deliver manual Tours?
How can I deliver manual Tours?

Learn how you can show Tours that are triggered manually, through permalinks, Launchers, and more.

Pulkit Agrawal avatar
Written by Pulkit Agrawal
Updated over a week ago

For holistic user education, you should consider both "push" and "pull" help. Chameleon enables you to do both, and in this article, we'll go over the various ways you can deliver "pull" guidance with Walkthrough Tours.

πŸ’‘ You can also configure buttons to trigger a Chameleon Tour or Microsurvey. Read this article to learn how to deliver Tours from buttons.


Once you choose to build a Walkthrough Tour from the Dashboard, you will find the Tour Sharing options in the last configuration panel:

Here you can use the 3 options available to share your Walkthrough Tour directly with your users, so they can start at their convenience:

  • add the domain URL where your Tour Starts and copy the URL to share it with your users,

  • use our API to trigger the Tour,

  • add it to an existing Chameleon Launcher, or create a new one.


Chameleon provides a unique query parameter for each Walkthrough Tour you create, which can be used to start it remotely. Just add this to the end of any URL in your app.

These links can be put to good use by including them in help articles, live chats, blog posts, and email announcements. They are a great way to provide interactive guidance for users and bring them to your app from external sources.

🎯 To successfully share your Tour via a URL, make sure that:

  • Your Tours are live -- the most recent published version of the Tour will load with the link.

  • Chameleon is properly installed on all pages where the Tour shows. Learn more here.

This Tour will display on the URL you add it to, regardless of the Tour's first Step URL, and will ignore any URL Rules on the first Step. The Tour will show for any user that accesses the link, irrespective of whether the user is part of the target audience or has seen the Tour before.

β„Ή We use query parameters instead of shortlinks with this sharing method to remove the dependency on browser cookies. Some browsers (e.g. Safari) disable cookies by default (the setting for "Website Tracking: Prevent cross-site tracking" is checked) so in these instances, the Tour link could not be able to load the appropriate URL and start the Tour.


Most commonly, Tour links are used when you want a Tour to display when a user clicks that link. For example, adding Tour links as an item in a Launcher or as a CTA of a hyperlinked text in an email.

πŸ‘‰ Because you want your Tour to start on click, any rules set for the first Step of the Tour are ignored (including triggers), and the Tour will display regardless.

β„Ή If no protocol setting is included Chameleon will prefix http:// onto the indicated Tour start URL. If your web app requires https, make sure to include it, or make sure your app redirects http URLs to https.


If the first Step of your Tour is matched to a dynamic URL, then you must first specify the exact URL to load with this Tour link. Chameleon doesn't support wildcards in Walkthrough Tour redirect URLs because we can not use them to point the user to a specific URL.

If this still doesn't work for you, you can use either of these options:

  1. Use a click-triggered automatic Tour either through an icon click (a Chameleon icon, so it doesn't require engineering time) or by hard-coding a button and using an element click.

  2. Create a Launcher that contains several helpful links, one of which launches this Tour. You can configure the Launcher to appear either by clicking a widget (added by Chameleon) or clicking an element that is hard-coded.

You can also use variables/merge tags to personalize your Tour start URL, in case you're looking to send this Tour Link to many users, each with their unique URL.

πŸ‘‰ Learn more about handling URLs in Chameleon.


You can also use our API to trigger a Tour for your users by adding the unique Tour ID in API calls. This way, you can include your Experience anywhere in your application and use triggers from there.

Check out how you can show a Tour via JS API here.

β„Ή If you're using this method, any Step Triggers that you have set (click/hover/delay) will be ignored by default and your Tour to show. But you can also change this option anytime.


Another way to deliver "Pull" help is by using Launchers. They provide an off-the-shelf customizable widget to display a menu of Tours (and more) that users can self-start at their convenience.

With each Walkthrough Tour you create, you can also include it in an existing Launcher or create a new one and add it as a Launcher item. Read this article to learn how to add items to your Launcher.

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