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.

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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.

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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

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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. 

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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.

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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.