One of the most popular and important features of having a Google Business Views virtual tour of the inside of your business is that you can embed the actual virtual tour right into your website or blog. You don’t need any API or pay for hosting fees. Google allows you to embed their Maps, Streetviews and the See Inside Business Views for free right wherever your clients will see it, and it works just like it does in Google Maps. I’m not talking about a link that opens the tour, I mean the actual full monty, fully interactive, click and drag virtual tour right in your website.
However last year Google launched a new version of Google Maps. The new version brought some great new features but they also left out some that were available in Classic Maps. One of these was the embed feature for Business Views tours. There were several work arounds available including a great little Chrome Extension that would grab the iFrame html code.
Thats all changed today with the addition of an ne Embed and Share Button on the new Google Maps.
Just navigate to the virtual tour. Position the view as to where you want the tour to start and click on the Gear Icon and open the Share and Embed Map menu.
From there you will be given options to either share a link or embed the image. The share option gives you a long link or the option to shorten it using Googles URL shortening app. Copy and paste that into your email and clicking on it will take you to the tour in Maps.
The second option is the one to embed the tour in your website. You will need to grab the html code to be placed in an iFrame on your website. You can select size presents or customise the iframe size so that it looks exactly how you want it on the website. Just copy the code that starts with “<irame src…etc and paste into your iframe wherever you want it on the website.
Cool huh?
No doubt there is much more to come from the Google Maps team but this is a feature we have been requesting for a while.