Onboarding problems are rarely in the signup form. They live in the minutes after it: the empty screen, the missing example, the step that needs a colleague who is not there yet.
A product tour explaining an empty screen is a workaround. Seeding the first session with realistic example content usually beats any amount of tooltip.
Write down every click between signup and the moment the product does something useful. The number is almost always higher than the team assumes.
One recorded or observed first-time session produces more usable cards than an hour of internal speculation.
It depends entirely on the product and how you define activation, so the useful comparison is your own rate over time rather than a benchmark. Define the moment of first value, measure it weekly, and change one thing at a time.
A tour is a last resort. Removing steps, pre-filling examples and making the empty state useful tend to move activation far more than an overlay explaining the interface.