Douglas College is the largest college in British Columbia, Canada, offering more bachelor’s degrees and post-degree programs than any other college in the province. Known for combining the academic foundations of a university with the career-ready focus of a college, Douglas is committed to delivering educational experiences that challenge and enlighten students.

To strengthen its virtual tour as a lead generation tool, Douglas implemented Circuit's on-entry gated form. This closed a critical gap in their lead capture strategy — more than doubling their tour audience and driving a 40% increase in total inquiries, giving their recruitment team a larger pool of prospective students to nurture toward enrollment. Across that expanded audience, Douglas maintained a 20.48% inquiry rate, more than double the performance of typical ungated approaches.

The problem

Douglas College has partnered with Circuit Virtual Tours since 2020. From the start, a top goal was to use their virtual tour as a lead generation tool to capture valuable prospect inquiries that they could nurture and support through to enrollment.

To achieve this, Douglas gated access to the tour using a form deployed on a webpage that required visitors to submit their information before entering.

Because the tour was launched from a landing page, gaps in the website gate made it easy to bypass the form. This was especially true for visitors coming from Google search, which drove 25% of tour traffic thanks to strong content indexing on the tour site. As a result, many users skipped the form entirely, limiting Douglas’ ability to consistently capture leads and leading to hundreds of missed prospective student inquiries each year.

Lastly, from a user experience perspective, the approach to gating often presented the form to return visitors who had already completed it, creating unnecessary friction.

“One of our biggest challenges was knowing that a portion of prospective students were engaging with the tour without ever connecting with our team.” - Axel Bernoe, Supervisor, Future Students’ Office

The solution

To help Douglas close gaps in their lead generation, they used Circuit's built-in form gating capabilities, which display a form to users the first time they enter the virtual tour regardless of the site or channel they came from. For Douglas, this meant every prospective student engaging with the tour became a captured lead their team could nurture through the months-long enrollment decision journey.

Circuit offers a spectrum of CTA timing options depending on how actively an institution wants to pursue lead generation, and multiple CTAs can be combined if desired. For more information, read our Calls to Action Overview.

Douglas implemented the gated on-entry form in July 2025, ensuring they no longer lost leads from visitors accessing the tour through channels beyond their website.

"Having the gated form functionality built directly into Circuit has been incredibly helpful for us. Our in-house solution worked to an extent but was not fully capturing traffic across all sources which left room for improvement" - Axel Bernoe, Supervisor, Future Students' Office

The results

After implementing the gated on-entry form, Douglas saw a significant increase in both lead volume and engagement.

Between July and December 2025, Douglas saw a 40% increase in inquiries compared to the first half of the year. This growth was driven through an increase in traffic flowing to the tour, and the Circuit gate ensured every visitor across every channel was captured, not just those arriving through the Douglas website.

Across that larger audience, Douglas maintained a 20.5% inquiry rate, exceeding the 5% to 9% range typical of non-gated form strategies, per a 2024 cohort analysis.

In short: a larger audience, converting at a predictably high rate.

Requiring visitors to submit their information before entering the tour also generated stronger engagement, as more committed, high-intent users self-selected into the experience.

In the six months following implementation:

• Engaged sessions increased by 56%
• Engagement (as measured by session duration) grew 53% year over year
• Tours started, tours completed, and scenes viewed increased by 113%, 51%, and 32% respectively

“We have been very pleased with how the new gated form is performing. It has significantly improved our ability to capture leads while increasing engagement with the tour.” - Axel Bernoe, Supervisor, Future Students’ Office

The takeaway

By implementing Circuit's gated form, Douglas closed a key gap in their lead generation strategy. Instead of relying on a website gate that could be bypassed, the College ensured that every visitor — regardless of how they arrived — became a captured lead.

The result was a significantly larger pool of prospective students for Douglas's recruitment team to engage, nurture, and convert into enrolled students. More reach, more leads, and a conversion rate that held strong at scale: Douglas's virtual tour is now a consistent, high-volume asset in their enrollment funnel.

Connect with Circuit to optimize lead generation through your virtual tour.