Call-to-action buttons for interactive demos: when, where, how?

Interactive demos follow either a linear, single flow sequence or a chaptered, multi-flow sequence. Which approach should your demos take? Well, as always, the answer depends.

Here’s an example of a single-flow demo:

Productboard, a project management software, deploys a product tour with a single flow sequence containing 10 steps.

Here’s an example of a multi-flow demo:

Sentinelone, a cyber security product, breaks its tour into 3 flows — one for each use-case. The total number of steps amounts to 23.

This edition of The Plot explores 3 data-driven insights around single vs multi-flow interactive demos. To maintain data hygiene, I’ve limited this study to marketing demos (product tours used on homepage, product pages, etc). Our recommendations vary for Sales and Customer Success use-cases because:

• Marketing demos are built for top of funnel buyers looking to learn more about your work. Prospects are typically short on time and attention so brevity takes priority. In this case, a taste of your product’s most relevant features is likely preferred to an in-depth walkthrough.
• By the time a prospect speaks to Sales or Customer Success, they’re further along the buying journey. At this stage, your product’s functionality and user experience take priority. Accordingly, prospects will likely prefer a more detailed product demo experience.

Ultimately, your choice between single vs. multi-flow demos should depend on which approach best showcases your product’s unique strengths to prospects.

Summary Statistics

• Sample Size: 8,800 sessions over 40 demo flows
• Avg step count: 23 steps
• Avg step count, single-flow demos: 26.1
• Avg step count, multi-flow demos (total): 79
• Avg step count, multi-flow demos (per flow): 13
• Avg Completion Rate: 22.21%

1. Twelve or fewer steps? Use single-flow demos

If you can boil your product demo down to twelve or fewer steps, a single flow demo is the way to go. This previous edition of The Plot confirmed a negative correlation between step count and completion rate. Correspondingly, building concise, single flow demos results in outstanding completion rates.

Single flow demos with under 12-steps achieve a completion rate of 34.66% — more than double the completion rate of single flow demos with over 12-steps (14.62%). There’s a clear drop in completion as the number of steps increase.

2. Can’t do under 12 steps? Use Multi-flow demos

We suggest limiting a demo to under around 12 steps. This parameter acts as a forcing function to highlight the most relevant aspects of your product without losing your prospect’s attention. 

That being said, it’s not always possible to do so. If your business sells especially complex/technical products or multiple products to multiple buyer personas, your step count is likely to exceed a dozen. 

In such cases, we strongly recommend breaking your demo into multiple flows. Multiple flows help organize larger demos into easily navigable chapters. Overall, this dramatically improves the demo experience for users looking to address specific use-cases or features.

On the surface, single and multi-flow demos achieve similar completion rates: (22.63% and 21.15% respectively), but a closer inspection reveals a different story. 

• On average, the first flow of a multi-flow demo achieves a completion rate of 47.79%. More than twice as much as the completion rate of the average single-flow demo (22.63%)
• Curiously, the second flow of a multi-flow demo also achieves a completion rate of 27.34% — 1.2x greater than the completion rate of a single-flow demo.
• On average, even the third flow achieves a completion rate of 25.12% — close to 3 percentage points greater than single flow demos. 

What’s especially interesting is that the average number of steps in the first three flows of a multi-flow demo add up to 32. This is well over the average number of steps found in a single-flow demo (26). And what does this mean? Multi-flow demos result in a greater rate of users consuming a more steps!

The real drop off with multi-flow demos occurs after the 4th, and especially after the 7th flow of a demo. Here, completion rates plummet to well under 10%. This leads us to our final insight of the day.

3. Limit the number of flows to under 8 per demo

Multi-flow demos help buyers learn more about various aspects of your product without feeling overwhelmed by a monolithic, all-encompassing flow. Accordingly, it’s important to ensure that the number of flows aren’t themselves too overwhelming to prospects.

The previous graph suggests that any more 8 or more flows per demo results in completion rates of around 5%. Not great. Accordingly, we recommend limiting multi-flow demos to 7 or fewer flows, with 3-5 flows being the sweet spot. 

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Before we wrap up, it’s worth sharing the following disclaimer: At the end of the day, your demo should be tailored to your audience. Depending on the nature of your product and prospects you may find success in ignoring these insights.

That being said, it’s worth using them as a starting point and iterating from there based on your own tests and experiments. For instance, if you sell a highly technical product to developers, your audience may expect to see a comprehensive product demo, even if it means several steps and flows. 

It’s also worth noting that completion rates may not always be the best metric to measure performance. For example, let’s say you create three flows — one for each buyer persona: A, B, and C. Maybe your website receives a lot more of buyer persona B, resulting in disproportionately higher completion rates as compared to the flows for A and C. This is not necessarily a problem with the demo or flow. Rather, it’s a reflection of what matters most to your audience.

Want to know how long your next demo should be? Say less.

Interactive demos are immersive, educational, and well...a lot more fun than regular old product images and videos. But how much is too much?

• At what point does an interactive demo go from engaging to excessive? 
• How does the length of an interactive demo impact its completion rate? 
• And what’s the perfect number of steps for an interactive demo? 

When I initially analyzed the data, I realized that answers to these questions largely depend on the nature of the audience, business, and industry. A complex product built for specialized customers probably warrants a lengthier demo than a relatively non-technical product.

Accordingly, to start with, I examined 34 demos across 9 industries to benchmark the average number of demo steps against completion rates.

• Step count: The number of steps contained within a demo (across flows)‍
• Completion rate: The rate at which engaged users complete the final step of a demo

Note: Interactive demos have a wide range of use-cases — each with its own “ideal” range of steps. To maintain hygiene, I’ve limited this analysis to marketing demos. That is to say, I’ve only considered demos that are placed on websites (homepage, product pages, solutions pages, etc) as marketing assets. In upcoming editions of The Plot, I’ll look into how step counts differ across other use-cases as well.

Okay, enough talk. Let’s get into the numbers.

Summary Statistics

• Number of Demos: 34 demos | 5,409 demo sessions 
• Number of Industries: 9 (Sales Tech, Marketing Tech, Product Tech, Finance Tech, HR Tech, Education Tech, Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, Data Tech)
• Average Demo Step Count: 21
• Minimum Step Count: 5
• Maximum Step Count: 88
• Average Completion Rate: 26%
• Maximum Completion Rate: 72%
• Minimum Completion Rate: 0%

Step Count vs Completion Rate

An aggregate analysis reveals a strong negative correlation between a demo’s step count and completion rate. Less is more: As the number of steps in a demo increases, the completion rate decreases.

More steps means more effort. Expectedly, this translates to fewer people completing the entire demo. A tweet (in most cases) is easier to get through than J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings trilogy. The logic here is no different. Especially since the majority of website traffic is still at the top of the funnel, brevity makes all the difference between completion and cessation.

• The top 10% of demos achieved a completion rate of 64.02% with an average step count of 9‍
• The bottom 10% of demos achieved a completion rate of 1.39% with an average step count of 37

Average Step Count, By Industry

Now that we’ve established that shorter demos usually outperform longer ones, in terms of completion. Let’s explore how step counts vary based on industry.

Even across industries, the trendline is clear: lengthy demos result in lower completion rates. 

The top 3 industries (Product, Marketing, and Sales) achieve an average completion rate of 41% with an average step count of 11.

The bottom 3 industries (Cloud, CyberSecurity, and Data) achieve an average completion rate of 10.7% with an average step count of 43.

Interestingly, there is a positive correlation between an industry’s technicality and demo length.

Cloud Computing, Cyber Security and Data Technology typically sell to highly technical buyers, which may explain why their interactive demos average at 43 steps. There's just a lot of material to get through.

On the other hand, Marketing and Sales products are relatively non-technical. In such cases, restricting the demo to under 12 steps seems to work best.  All in all, for marketing use-cases, our analysis recommends no more than 8-12  steps.

Learnings & Best Practices

In addition to the cold hard numbers, let's conclude this essay with a few qualitative learnings and patterns from the analysis.

• Decisive, not drawn-out: Aim to hook visitors to the larger value of your product within the first couple of steps of your demo. Avoid dragging prospects through page after page of granular detail. Remember, you don’t have to cover every little feature — only what customers care about most. 

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• Concise, clean copy: The best performing demos adopt simple, non-technical copy in their interactive demos. Persuasive, clear language helps a wider audience relate to your product. This practice applies across the board: tooltips, hotspots, media modals, and CTAs.

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• Segment with flows: Of course, it’s not always possible to compress an entire product into under a dozen steps. In such cases, implementing a “choose your own adventure” flow structure helps prospects organize their exploration, and avoid being overwhelmed by a new piece of software.

I’ve been seeing (rapidly) growing interest in Storylane’s Demo-led SEO strategy so I thought it might be worth digging into the data to share our results so far.

For context, Demo-led SEO originated from an experiment that involved adding interactive demos to 1,500 “tutorial” pages (as an alternative to regular text blogs) with the objective of growing our search traffic. In truth, the outcome has been above and beyond anything I could’ve expected.

In just over a quarter, we’ve increased monthly traffic from 25,000/mo to nearly 150,000/mo through Demo-led SEO. We're on track to hit 200,000/mo by the end of August. But it’s not only about rankings and footfall. These Demo-led pages have significantly outperformed textual blogs in terms of on-page performance, product sign-ups, and even deal conversions. 

In this edition of The Plot, I’ll break down the data to reveal how our Demo-led SEO pages compare to industry benchmarks. In later editions, I’ll share a detailed guide on why Demo-led SEO has worked so well for us — and how you can adopt the same.

I. SERP Rankings

Let’s start from the top. Of the roughly 1,500 Demo-led SEO pages we’ve published so far,

• 91% of pages rank in the top 20 results
• 53% of pages rank in the top 10 results
• And most impressively, 19% of pages rank in the top 3 results

What’s especially interesting is that the majority of these articles started ranking in under 10 days — all with significantly lower word counts (Avg 50-100 words) than the competition. This goes to show that lengthy, keyword dense content really isn’t everything when it comes to satisfying searcher intent.

Here are a few examples of Demo-led SEO pages outranking competing pages:

II. Website Traffic

Naturally, this boost in rankings has had a major impact on website traffic as well. Since launching this Demo-led SEO initiative, our impressions and clicks have increased by 6x in just over a quarter:

As mentioned, we went from around 25,000 monthly clicks to close to 150,000 monthly clicks in around 3 months. We’re on track to breaking 200,000 by the end of August.

III. Bounce Rate

It’s one thing to draw in a lot of website traffic — but what does visitors behavior actually look like on-page? Here’s how the data stacks up in terms of bounce rates, engagement time, and views per user.

As per ContentSquare’s 2023 Digital Experience Benchmark Explorer, the year-on-year bounce rate in the Software industry has increased by 5.25%. As it stands, the benchmark for bounce rate is a scary 70.3%. Correspondingly, the average engagement rate is at just 29.7%. 

Here’s the fun part:

‍Over the past quarter, our Demo-led SEO pages achieved an average bounce rate of just 28.8% and an engagement rate of a whopping 71.2%. 

Of course, the nature of these tutorials may have a part to play in this dramatic improvement — but there’s no denying that the inherently “engaging” nature of interactive demos have contributed to the 2.4x lower bounce rate than industry benchmarks.

IV. Engagement Time

Average engagement time per session is auto-calculated via web page data set up with Google Analytics. The benchmark for this metric is around 52 seconds. Our Demo-led pages achieved just about 15 seconds. This is just under 30% of the industry average. On first glance, this may seem catastrophic. After all, we’ve been taught that engagement time is crucial to Google’s rankings.

But…the data seems to disagree.

‍A quick time-to-value may in fact be seen as a benefit to user experience. Why should a visitor spend several minutes on a long textual tutorial, when an interactive demo could convey the same information in just a few seconds? This may explain why these pages continue to rank as well as they do — even with significantly lower engagement times.

V. Page views per User

Finally, we arrive at page views per user. Page views can be an important indicator of a visitor’s interest in your business (or at least your website). So how do Demo-led pages compare against traditional web pages? Pretty well! 

While the average number of page views per session in the software industry hangs around 2 pages, Demo-led SEO pages achieve views per user of 2.15. This is around 7.5% better than the industry benchmark. This may seem like a humble improvement, the implications are real. Visitors viewing more pages directly translates to better intent, and in turn, greater odds of conversion. 

Before concluding this edition, it’s also worth highlighting the bottom line impact of Demo-led SEO on conversions and pipeline. Even in its early days, we’re seeing a very healthy 40% MoM improvement from this initiative. Most impressively, over the past quarter, we’ve closed multiple annual deals worth $10,000+ that can be directly attributed to Demo-led SEO.

All this is to say that the value of Demo-led SEO is not limited to improving top of the funnel traffic. Instead, I see it as a genuinely powerful channel to attract qualified visitors and drive real revenue.

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Learnings & Takeaways

In summary, here’s our experience with Demo-led SEO over the past quarter:

• SERP Rankings: Over half of our 1,500+ pages ranking in the Top 10 of the SERP (and 19% in the Top 3). Theories on why this is working for us involve Google’s preference for interactive content and iframes. More on this soon…
• Website Traffic: A 6x skyrocket in website traffic from 25k/mo to nearly 150k/mo as a result of the excellent boost in rankings and the user engagement that followed.
• Bounce Rate: A nose dive in bounce rates (28.8%) as compared to industry benchmarks (70.3%). This is attributed to the inherently engaging, clickable nature of interactive demos (as compared to textual content)
• Engagement Time: A significant drop in engagement time from industry benchmarks of 52 seconds to about 15 seconds. While this may initially seem like cause for concern, improving a visitor’s speed-to-value may actually be beneficial under Google’s eyes. This is reflected in the aforementioned performance in rankings.
• Page views per User: A notable achievement of 2.15 views per user from Demo-led pages as compared to industry average of 2. This likely has a multiplier effect on sign-ups and conversions.