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
You’ve built a great demo and now it’s time to share it with the world. Your website is a promising place to start — but what, where, and how should your demos be placed on-site to maximize engagement? In this edition of The Plot, we’ve analyzed over 130,000 demo sessions to share 3 data-backed learnings on demo placement for your website. Let’s dive in.
What | Home, product, and tour pages
The overwhelming majority of interactive demos are embedded on-page (in-line) or linked to CTA buttons (pop-up) on the homepage, product pages, and/or dedicated product tour pages. This is no accident. These are simply the most relevant pages for visitors to learn more about your product.
We recommend starting with demos for any one (or all three) of these types of pages. Here’s what this could look like:
Homepage demo
A concise, high-level product tour that walks visitors through key features and use-cases in 8-12 steps. The objective here is to capture attention and encourage top of the funnel prospects to learn more about your work. Accordingly, you might want to make this one captivating, relevant, and snappy.
Product page demos
These are demos for top and middle of the funnel prospects looking to dig deeper into specific product features. Accordingly, these demos may be granular; segmented by individual products or solutions. Again, don’t forget to keep them short — highlight only the most pertinent aspects of each product.
Product tour page
Many customers deploy dedicated product tour pages for prospects to explore multiple features under one roof. This is especially valuable to audiences from highly technical verticals such as cybersecurity. If you have too much product to cover in a single demo, use the Gallery or Playlist layout with Demo Hub.
Where | The higher up, the better
Where should your demo show up on the page for maximum visibility? This one is pretty intuitive: the higher up, the better. Placing your demos or demo CTAs closer to the top ensures that visitors come across them without much scrolling. This translates to better demo engagement. The data supports this: there’s a strong negative correlation between the fold a demo is placed on and its click-through rate.
Place your demos or demo CTA buttons on the first fold, second fold, or navbar for maximum visibility. On average, placing demos any lower may result in CTRs that are well under 10%. Not great.
How | Inline vs CTA buttons - dealer’s choice
In the examples shared above, you may have noticed that some demos are embedded directly onto the page (in-line) while others are linked to a CTA button (pop-up or linked-out to their product tour pages). How do these methods differ in terms of CTR? Not by much. On average, in-line demos achieve slightly higher CTRs (26%) than CTA buttons (23%).
Since there’s a negligible difference in terms of CTR, make your decision based on your design preferences and objectives. In-line demos certainly stand out as compared to pop-up CTAs, but if subtlety is what you’re going for, especially on pages with multiple demos, pop-up CTAs may work better.
In my research for this report, I noticed that most homepages adopt a CTA button while the majority of product and product tour pages adopt in-line demos. It’s worth experimenting to identify what works best for your website.
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.
Register for the webinar here.
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.
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.
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