€0.50 a hotspot means about €1.07 a station
Analytics on your tour is priced at €0.50 for each distinct navigation connection, and two arrows in one panorama that lead to the same place count once. Across the seventeen tours we have delivered, arrows collapse by 51.7% when you count destinations instead of arrows. The result settles at about 2.15 connections for every position in the building, which works out at roughly €1.07 per position. That is the number we bill on, and it is the smaller of the two we could have chosen.
Three numbers, and which one you pay for
Everyone in this field says “hotspots”, and the word covers at least three different things that a tour file distinguishes cleanly. Across our seventeen delivered tours the counts are these, and all of them are true:
- 1,614 overlays in total
- Every clickable thing placed on a panorama, of any kind. This is the number the project pages quote when they say “navigation and information hotspots”, and it is the largest of the three.
- 1,441 navigation arrows
- The subset whose click action moves you somewhere. These are the arrows on the floor. They are included in every tour at no charge, without limit, because the arrows are how you walk the building — they are the product, not an extra.
- 696 distinct connections
- The number of unique A-to-B links in the building once duplicates are removed. This is the billable unit for analytics, and it is 51.7% smaller than the arrow count.
- 146 information popups
- Overlays that open something rather than move you — a text panel, a photograph over the panorama. Not navigation, not analytics-billable under this line, and part of the build rather than the walk.
- 27 everything else
- A link that opens a window, an audio trigger, and overlays with no click action at all. Small, and reported rather than swept into a rounder number.
The definitions live on arrows, connections and popups, which is worth reading first if any of that was new. Nothing on this page uses the bare word “hotspot” without saying which one it means.
The rule that halves the number
In a real building you often place several arrows in one panorama that all go to the same destination. A large lobby might have an arrow at the foot of the stairs and another one visible from the far side of the room, both landing on the first-floor landing. A guest who turns round should still see a way out. That is good navigation design and it is why we place them.
It would also be an easy way to inflate a bill. So the metered unit is the connection, not the arrow: two arrows in one panorama that lead to the same place count once. Add a third for good measure and the analytics line does not move.
What that rule takes off the bill is not a rounding error. Here is what it does to eight delivered tours, largest collapse first:
| Tour | Navigation arrows | Distinct connections | Collapsed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fenix Apart-Hotel | 429 | 155 | 63.9% |
| Hotel Nertili | 229 | 97 | 57.6% |
| Hotel Moskva | 211 | 126 | 40.3% |
| Canadian Institute of Technology | 186 | 107 | 42.5% |
| Social Camp Jale | 124 | 62 | 50.0% |
| Hostel Kapsul | 56 | 34 | 39.3% |
| Restorant Menca | 23 | 17 | 26.1% |
| Turist Shop, Lungomare | 13 | 12 | 7.7% |
Read out of the delivered tour files. Across all seventeen tours: 1,441 arrows, 696 distinct connections, 745 collapsed, 51.7%.
The spread is the interesting part. A six-position seafront shop barely collapses at all — it is a simple graph and almost every arrow is the only route to where it goes. A seventy-two-station apart-hotel with sixteen apartments off shared halls collapses by nearly two-thirds, because the halls are full of redundant ways back to the same place. Density of arrows is a fact about circulation, not about how much work went in.
Why it settles at about two per position
Across the whole archive the mean is 2.15 distinct connections per position, and in twelve of the seventeen tours the median position carries exactly two. The range of tour means runs from 1.50 to 2.43 — a four-position apartment at the bottom, a capsule hostel and a small restaurant at the top. That is a narrower band than we expected before counting, and it holds from a four-position flat to a seventy-two-position building.
It has an obvious explanation once you see it: a position is usually reached from one place and leads on to one other, plus a few junctions and halls that are reached from several. The busiest single panorama in the archive is in a seafront hotel and carries nine distinct connections. Most carry two.
What it costs
Analytics is €0.50 for each distinct navigation connection, wired in at build time and reporting to your own Analytics property. At 2.15 connections per position that is about €1.07 for each position in your building. There is a €50 one-off if you have no Analytics property yet and we have to create one; if you already have one there is nothing to set up and nothing to pay.
This publishes a number that reduces our own invoice
We could have billed the arrow count. It is the number sitting in the file, it is the number the project pages already quote, and no client would have known to ask. Choosing the deduplicated number roughly halves this line on every job, and publishing the collapse rate means you can check we applied it. That trade is deliberate: a price you can verify is worth more to us than the difference, and it is the only defence against the incentive to place a fourth arrow nobody needed.
What analytics will and will not tell you
- It will tell you which positions people move to, which routes get used, where a session ends, and how deep into a building a typical visitor goes.
- It will not tell you whether any of that produced a booking, an enquiry or a sale. Those events happen on your booking system, not inside the tour.
- We do not see it. The events go to your property. We are not a party to the data and we do not hold a copy of it.
- It is not a heatmap of gaze. It is navigation events. If somebody sells you attention mapping inside a 360° panorama, ask them exactly what is being recorded and where it goes.
Every figure on this page was counted out of tour files we built, not sourced from an industry study — there is no external number in this post because there is no external source for it. The method behind the counting is in why we counted the hotspots instead of estimating them, and the full per-tour dataset is in seventeen tours in numbers.
Questions people ask
- What does virtual tour analytics cost?
- Vronos charges €0.50 for each distinct navigation connection in the tour, plus a one-off €50 only if you have no Google Analytics property yet. Because duplicate arrows leading to the same destination are counted once, and our delivered tours average 2.15 distinct connections per camera position, it works out at roughly €1.07 for each position in the building. The navigation arrows themselves are included free and unlimited in every tour.
- If there are two arrows going to the same room, do I pay twice?
- No. Two arrows placed in one panorama that lead to the same destination count as one connection and are billed once. Across the seventeen tours we have delivered, applying that rule reduces the billable count from 1,441 arrows to 696 connections — a 51.7% reduction. It exists so that good navigation design, which often means giving people more than one visible way back, does not cost them money.
- How many hotspots does a virtual tour have?
- It depends which kind you mean, and the three numbers differ a lot. Across our seventeen delivered tours there are 1,614 overlays in total, of which 1,441 are navigation arrows, 146 are information popups and 27 are other actions. Once duplicate arrows are collapsed, those 1,441 arrows represent 696 distinct connections. A tour typically has about two distinct connections per camera position.
- Do you see my analytics data?
- No. The tracking is wired into your own Google Analytics property at build time and the events go directly there. We do not hold a copy, we do not run a dashboard you have to log into, and if you later move the tour to a different host the tracking moves with the files because it is part of them.
- Can I add analytics to a tour you have already delivered?
- Yes. It is a build change rather than a re-shoot, priced the same way — €0.50 for each distinct navigation connection in the existing tour, plus the €50 one-off only if you have no Analytics property. Tell us which tour and we will count the connections in it and quote a fixed figure before doing anything.
