The gate debate: should you gate your interactive demos?
At its core, the purpose of demo automation is to minimize the friction between prospects and product.
Interactive demos help buyers understand a software without jumping through hoops of contact forms, calendar links, and qualifying calls. That being said, lead gen forms continue to remain essential to most B2B sales processes. A prospect submitting their details to talk to sales or try out a product is one of the strongest signals of buying intent.
Between these two viewpoints lies the question: Should you gate your interactive demos?
On one hand, gated demos generate leads but hamper engagement due to the added friction of forms. On the other hand, ungated demos maximize engagement but don’t directly incentivize form submissions.
In this edition of The Plot, we analyze over 500,000 demo sessions to compare gated, partially gated (Gated mid-way through the demo), and ungated demos based on the following metrics:
- Engagement Rate: Rate of viewer that click on an interactive demo or CTA
- Conversion Rate: Rate of engaged users that convert to leads (i.e. submit in-demo lead gen form)
- Time Spent Per User: Number of minutes/seconds spent on demo per user
The goal with this analysis is to convey the value of each approach, so you can make an informed decision with your own demos. Let’s dive right in.
Summary Statistics
- Sample Size: 535,763 demo sessions across 50 Companies
- Average Engagement Rate: 14.7%
- Average Conversion Rate: 15%
- Average Time Spent: 1 min 29 seconds
1. Engagement Rates
As intuition might suggest, there’s a strong correlation between accessibility and engagement. Gated demos result in the lowest (albeit, still quite impressive) engagement rate of 9.20%. This means that nearly one in every ten users are willing to submit a leadgen form for demo access.
Given the relatively frictionless experience, ungated demos achieve more than double this engagement rate at 19.40%. Partially gated demos fall in between the two with an engagement rate of 15.50%.
If engagement is your primary objective with interactive demos, the data is clear: Avoid gates. Assuming that your demo is relevant and persuasive, there’s a good chance users signs-up for next steps after the fact anyway.
Additionally, with Storylane’s account reveal, you’ll identify anonymous companies viewing your demos anyway. While this won’t be at a user-level, it’s certainly worth the 2.1x improvement in overall engagement.
2. Conversion Rates
No real surprises here either. Gating a demo right off the bat leaves prospects with no choice but to submit the lead gen form. This results in a whopping 43% of engaged users converting to leads. Sounds good, but may not necessarily be all that helpful. Here’s why:
Interactive demos give potential buyers a chance to see if they’re a good fit for your product before making a decision to sign-up. Ruling out this possibility with a leadgen form may result in a large volume of unqualified, low-intent “leads”.
For example, a visitor may land on a homepage and come across a gated interactive demo. Interested to learn more, they may submit the lead gen form and spend a couple of minutes on the demo before realizing that this is not what they’re looking for.
By this point, however, they’re in the CRM and are likely to receive the full brunt of marketing and sales efforts. This is ultimately irrelevant to the prospect and expensive to the GTM team.
There’s a dramatic drop off in conversion rate for partially gated demos (4.99%). This is likely because users bounce off once they realize that they have to submit a form half way through the demo for the full version.
Ungated demos also experience a significant drop off (0.30%) in conversion rates, since the ask (form) is placed after the offer (demo).
All in all: If lead generation (albeit possibly unqualified) is your primary objective with interactive demos, the data strongly points to gated demos.
3. Time Spent Per User
This one is a little more interesting. Unlike the previous two metrics, time spent per user takes a U-shape when comparing gated, partially gated, and ungated demos.
Gated demos achieve the highest average time spent per user at 2min 26s. Ungated demos take second place with 1min and 22s. While partially gated demos achieve the lowest average time spent at 44s.
Here’s my theory on why this is the case:
Gated demos win out by a large margin because they incur a sunken cost (a lead gen form submission). Personally, if I share my details for a gated asset, I care about the asset a little more than I otherwise would. After all, I’ve paid for it with my data.
It’s also more likely that a user submits a lead gen form only if they’re sure they’d find the gated asset relevant, further explaining the 1.7x time spent per user as compared to ungated demos.
The reason partially gated demos fare poorly in comparison to even ungated demos is probably behavioral. I wouldn’t be thrilled if a movie I’ve been looking forward to all week is interrupted by a paywall at the climax. The sentiment here may be similar — an unexpected gate that results in users bouncing off the demo.
That’s not to say partially gated demos don’t work — they’re possibly a great solution if you’re looking to optimize for engagement AND leads. If this is your choice, we recommend gating the demo around the 5th step.
And there you have it! There isn’t any one right answer to whether or not you should gate your demos. Instead, your choice should be based on your use-case and objectives, as each approach has its own benefit. Hopefully, this data aggregate helps in making your decision a little easier.
At its core, the purpose of demo automation is to minimize the friction between prospects and product.
Interactive demos help buyers understand a software without jumping through hoops of contact forms, calendar links, and qualifying calls. That being said, lead gen forms continue to remain essential to most B2B sales processes. A prospect submitting their details to talk to sales or try out a product is one of the strongest signals of buying intent.
Between these two viewpoints lies the question: Should you gate your interactive demos?
On one hand, gated demos generate leads but hamper engagement due to the added friction of forms. On the other hand, ungated demos maximize engagement but don’t directly incentivize form submissions.
In this edition of The Plot, we analyze over 500,000 demo sessions to compare gated, partially gated (Gated mid-way through the demo), and ungated demos based on the following metrics:
- Engagement Rate: Rate of viewer that click on an interactive demo or CTA
- Conversion Rate: Rate of engaged users that convert to leads (i.e. submit in-demo lead gen form)
- Time Spent Per User: Number of minutes/seconds spent on demo per user
The goal with this analysis is to convey the value of each approach, so you can make an informed decision with your own demos. Let’s dive right in.
Summary Statistics
- Sample Size: 535,763 demo sessions across 50 Companies
- Average Engagement Rate: 14.7%
- Average Conversion Rate: 15%
- Average Time Spent: 1 min 29 seconds
1. Engagement Rates
As intuition might suggest, there’s a strong correlation between accessibility and engagement. Gated demos result in the lowest (albeit, still quite impressive) engagement rate of 9.20%. This means that nearly one in every ten users are willing to submit a leadgen form for demo access.
Given the relatively frictionless experience, ungated demos achieve more than double this engagement rate at 19.40%. Partially gated demos fall in between the two with an engagement rate of 15.50%.
If engagement is your primary objective with interactive demos, the data is clear: Avoid gates. Assuming that your demo is relevant and persuasive, there’s a good chance users signs-up for next steps after the fact anyway.
Additionally, with Storylane’s account reveal, you’ll identify anonymous companies viewing your demos anyway. While this won’t be at a user-level, it’s certainly worth the 2.1x improvement in overall engagement.
2. Conversion Rates
No real surprises here either. Gating a demo right off the bat leaves prospects with no choice but to submit the lead gen form. This results in a whopping 43% of engaged users converting to leads. Sounds good, but may not necessarily be all that helpful. Here’s why:
Interactive demos give potential buyers a chance to see if they’re a good fit for your product before making a decision to sign-up. Ruling out this possibility with a leadgen form may result in a large volume of unqualified, low-intent “leads”.
For example, a visitor may land on a homepage and come across a gated interactive demo. Interested to learn more, they may submit the lead gen form and spend a couple of minutes on the demo before realizing that this is not what they’re looking for.
By this point, however, they’re in the CRM and are likely to receive the full brunt of marketing and sales efforts. This is ultimately irrelevant to the prospect and expensive to the GTM team.
There’s a dramatic drop off in conversion rate for partially gated demos (4.99%). This is likely because users bounce off once they realize that they have to submit a form half way through the demo for the full version.
Ungated demos also experience a significant drop off (0.30%) in conversion rates, since the ask (form) is placed after the offer (demo).
All in all: If lead generation (albeit possibly unqualified) is your primary objective with interactive demos, the data strongly points to gated demos.
3. Time Spent Per User
This one is a little more interesting. Unlike the previous two metrics, time spent per user takes a U-shape when comparing gated, partially gated, and ungated demos.
Gated demos achieve the highest average time spent per user at 2min 26s. Ungated demos take second place with 1min and 22s. While partially gated demos achieve the lowest average time spent at 44s.
Here’s my theory on why this is the case:
Gated demos win out by a large margin because they incur a sunken cost (a lead gen form submission). Personally, if I share my details for a gated asset, I care about the asset a little more than I otherwise would. After all, I’ve paid for it with my data.
It’s also more likely that a user submits a lead gen form only if they’re sure they’d find the gated asset relevant, further explaining the 1.7x time spent per user as compared to ungated demos.
The reason partially gated demos fare poorly in comparison to even ungated demos is probably behavioral. I wouldn’t be thrilled if a movie I’ve been looking forward to all week is interrupted by a paywall at the climax. The sentiment here may be similar — an unexpected gate that results in users bouncing off the demo.
That’s not to say partially gated demos don’t work — they’re possibly a great solution if you’re looking to optimize for engagement AND leads. If this is your choice, we recommend gating the demo around the 5th step.
And there you have it! There isn’t any one right answer to whether or not you should gate your demos. Instead, your choice should be based on your use-case and objectives, as each approach has its own benefit. Hopefully, this data aggregate helps in making your decision a little easier.
Related Articles
I don’t know about you, but I've yet to come across a piece of marketing that’s as simple yet persuasive as a call-to-action button. It’s incredible how a few well-chosen words within a colorful little box can make all the difference between a customer’s curiosity and conversion.
Arguably more important than its design or copy, however, is the placement of the CTA button. That is to say: the accessibility, frequency, and positioning of your CTA all play key roles in turning views into clicks.
While there’s tons of research on CTA placement for websites and landing pages, we thought it might be helpful to conduct a similar analysis for the CTAs that go on interactive demos. We examined conversion data across 19 companies and thousands of demo sessions to arrive at 3 actionable insights that I’ll be covering in this edition of Storylane Labs.
Summary Statistics
- Sample size: 19 companies
- Avg interactive demo conversion rate: 26%
- Avg CTA frequency: 3.04
- Avg number of unique CTAs: 1.3
- Most common CTA position: End of demo/flow
Our research finds that the average CTA conversion rate with interactive demos is 26%. To me, this is already pretty great given that even the most successful landing pages convert at around 10%.
But what’s really staggering is that the best performing demos in our analysis achieved conversion rates of a whopping 52%. Fifty. Two. Percent. Keep in mind that these aren’t small ask CTAs either — I’m talking heavy hitters such as “Get a demo” and “Book an onboarding call”.
So what are these demos doing so right with their CTA placement that over half their sessions proceed to the next desired action? Here are three learnings:
Insight #1 - Persistence pays off
Rather than a sporadic sprinkling of CTA buttons, the most successful demos deploy a persistent CTA throughout the length of the flow. No matter how hard we try, we’re never going to know exactly what a user is looking for until we chat with them.
Accordingly, it’s that much more difficult to predict and place a CTA on the exact steps of the product demo that will resonate most with a user. Using a persistent CTA ensures that no matter where a buyer is along your demo, they have access to next steps.
Insight #2 - What’s better than one? Two!
15% of the demos in our analysis achieved conversion rates greater than or equal to 50%. Every single one of these demos employed two CTAs: a primary and a secondary.
Intuitively, I’d assumed that a single CTA ensures a focused ask, which in turn translates to improved conversion rates. However, the data reveals that surfacing a couple (2) CTAs at the same time can actually drive up conversion rates.
But here’s the catch: There must be a hierarchy in CTAs; they can’t both be “big asks”.
For example, a dual CTA of “Book a demo” and “See pricing” is one big ask (Book a demo) and one small ask (See pricing). This is not demanding too much of prospects, and in fact, there’s a good chance they proceed to book a demo after they visit the pricing page.
“Book a demo” and “Start for Free”, on the other hand, are two big, big requests. I’d be over the moon if a prospect follows through with one of them, but asking for both is asking for too much. Try to avoid this.
Insight #3 - End on a high note
Finally, and this one may be a little more obvious, is to end your demo with a primary CTA. The value of finishing strong is easy to appreciate, and the data agrees.
If you decide against deploying a persistent CTA on your demo, placing a CTA on the final step will help make up for it by encouraging users to proceed to next steps.
This may be to book a demo, start a trial, or maybe even explore other demos of your product — regardless, this placement works well. Note that this concluding CTA may (and should) be placed at the end of every flow as well; not just at the end of the overall demo.
And there you have it! As an added bonus, here are two of the highest and lowest performing CTA copies each from our analysis. Of course, context is paramount when it comes to effective copy, but these may nonetheless be helpful when you’re building your next interactive demo:
Highest converting CTAs
- “Get a demo”
- “Learn more”
Lowest converting CTAs:
- “Let’s talk”
- “Start free trial”
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.
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.
.png)
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.
- 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.
- 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.
Make buying easy with Storylane
Chat with our demo expert to find out how 2500+ companies use Storylane to drive more revenue