On average, only about 2% of website traffic converts.

As you might expect, a lot of effort goes into cranking this number up. I’m talking chatbots, exit pop-ups, gated resources, webinars, ROI calculators — the list goes on. At the end of the day, these lead magnets are issued with the objective of drawing in more sign-ups from your website.

Typically, this conversion funnel is pretty straightforward. Let’s say you deploy a chatbot on your website. For every 1,000 visitors that engage with this chatbot, maybe 20 submit their emails. Out of this 20, maybe 10 are sales qualified leads. And out of this 10, maybe 2 become paying customers. 

In such cases, it’s easy to (at least partially) attribute leads and pipeline back to the chatbot. A similar formula applies in the case of gated interactive demos: a set of visitors come across your gated demo, out of which a subset submit your lead gen form to gain access. From here, a smaller subset goes on to become customers. This is your pipeline from interactive demos. 

Simple? Sure. Recommended? Not so much.

Lead attribution for ungated interactive demos

At Storylane, we consistently discourage gating interactive demos. In our view, if people see your product in action and find value in it, they’re bound to sign-up on their own accord anyway. Gating a website resource merely adds to buying friction and discourages engagement. In fact, previous editions of The Plot verify that ungated demos receive more than 2x the engagement as their gated counterparts.

If anything, opening up relevant website resources such as interactive product demos act as a self-qualifying criteria that encourages fewer but far more relevant, high-quality conversions.

But how do you attribute these conversions back to your demos without a form or a gate? I’m excited to share Storylane’s novel approach to lead attribution for ungated interactive demos

A novel approach to lead attribution for interactive demos

Let’s take a quick example to highlight how lead attribution works on Storylane. Of course, the first step in this process entails integrating Storylane with your CRM. 

1. Let’s say an unknown visitor engages with an ungated interactive demo on your website. 

2. After an unspecified period of time, the same visitor returns to sign-up for, say, a free trial. Following their form submission, the visitor’s data is captured in your CRM as a lead.

3. At this point, Storylane will automatically identify this lead and tie them back to their engagement with your interactive demo, thereby attributing the conversion to the ungated interactive demo.

In other words, we’re flipping the script to retroactively attribute leads in your CRM to the ungated interactive demo they engaged with prior to their conversion. 

How does Storylane’s lead attribution work?

When you publish a demo on your website, Storylane automatically inserts a script (a tiny piece of code) onto the demo. Once the script is up and running (and Storylane is integrated to your CRM), we will automatically make sense of the users engaging with your demos and map them back to your CRM.

Demo engagement data from Storylane will be automatically populated within your CRM, allowing you to better understand the influence of your interactive demos on lead conversion. Learn more.

If you’ve played around with Storylane, you might have noticed that we support a couple of unique demo formats: Screenshot demos and HTML demos. But how exactly are they different? And when should you use what? 

This edition of The Plot addresses everything you need to know about these demo formats so you can make an informed decision based on your use-case and objective. 

Screenshot Demos

As its name suggests, screenshot demos are image-based demos that capture and compile screenshots from your browser. Screenshot demos are particularly useful in building quick demos that do not require in-image edits. Here’s an example of a screenshot demo:

Steps to capture screenshot demos

1. Install the Storylane Chrome extension
2. Open the tab you wish to capture
3. Launch the extension, select “Create new demo”
4. Select “Screenshot demo”
5. Capture a screenshot with every “click”
6. Select “Stop recording” once complete

Storylane also supports an alternative approach that involves manually uploading screenshots from computers or mobile devices. Once complete, you’ll receive a preview of the capture flow before moving on to edit the demo with guides, hotspots, and more.

The benefits with screenshot demos

Screenshot demos are essentially a series of curated images to showcase what the product looks like.  On one hand, this means it’s harder to edit in-image content such as text, numbers, and graphics. That being said, their straightforward nature translates to valuable benefits in terms of speed and scalability.

• Speed: Screenshot demos are easy and quick to build. An entire product walkthrough may be captured, edited, and published in under 10 minutes. This demo format is also marginally quicker to load as compared to HTML demos, making it ideal for page-speed conscious websites.
• Scalability: Given their ease of use, screenshot demos are also relatively more scalable than their HTML counterparts. In fact, the 5-person marketing team at Storylane produced over 1,500 screenshot demos in little over a quarter for our Demo-led SEO tutorial pages. Read more here.

Are screenshot demos for you?

Overall, screenshot demos are highly recommended to new users experimenting with demo automation. Screenshot demos are also the perfect choice for marketing and customer success use-cases, where snappy, attention-sensitive communication takes priority over immersive product experiences. Here are a few use-cases with screenshot demos:

• Website demos: built to provide top of funnel visitors with a high-level product overview
• Product tutorials: typically built on an ad hoc basis to guide users on specific workflows
• Documentation: built for simple troubleshooting or onboarding instructions (as shown above!)

Another nifty advantage with Screenshot demos is multi-tab capture. This lets you capture screens across multiple tabs in your browser. Multi-tab capture comes in handy when your demo entails hopping between multiple websites and platforms.

HTML Demos

HTML demos are exact replicas of your product’s frontend. They’re hands-on experiences that support in-demo scrolling, full fledged editing, personalization, and sandbox environments. Here’s an example:

And here’s a walkthrough on how to capture HTML demos:

Storylane supports 3 capturing methods for HTML demos:

• Single capture: Manually navigate to and capture individual pages 
• Continuous capture: Auto-capture pages as you click through the product 
• Timed capture: Auto-capture 1 page at a time after a 3s countdown

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You may also rename screens as you capture them for better sorting or auto link screens as you create a demo to ensure the right buttons lead to the right pages. Learn more about HTML capture here.

The Benefits with HTML Demos

HTML demos provide users with an immersive feel of the product without actually sharing product access. It’s as close to the real deal as it gets. The ability to customize names and logos with tokens, blur sensitive information, and edit in-product text and data make for a rich experience. Benefits include:

• Immersion: HTML demos are pixel-perfect copies of the captured UI. Accordingly, they deliver true-to-life product experience without the added friction of signing up, onboarding, etc. 
• Customization: HTML demos offer far deeper customization than screenshot demos. You may edit content, anonymize elements, embed media, deploy text triggers, and more. This results in relevant, personalized experiences that showcase your product in the best possible light. 

Another underrated benefit with HTML demos is its mobile-friendly nature. Since HTML demos capture the front-end of your entire product, your interactive demos will automatically optimize for mobile, so long as your product is too!

Are HTML demos for you?

Overall, HTML demos are strongly recommended for pre-sales and sales use-cases. This is because, by the time your prospects talk to sales, they’re a long way along the customer journey. At this stage, it’s important to deliver a true product experience as opposed to surface level overviews:

• Live demos: A safe (but immersive) sandbox demo environment for sales reps and AEs to confidently use during live demos. Storylane supports talk tracks and presenter notes to further support salesfolk during customer conversations.

Leave behinds: Rather than boring old sales decks and videos, HTML demos are great leave behinds that help prospects review your product in their own time or confidently champion internal buy-in. Here’s a video on the world of difference that Storylane-powered sales makes:

And there you have it! In summary, both screenshot and HTML demos serve important demo automation use-cases. In fact, we see customers using both formats across functions all the time! That being said, each format has unique benefits that shine in particular circumstances. Overall, we suggest screenshot demos for marketing and customer success and HTML demos for sales and pre-sales.

A couple of months ago, we made a lot of noise inaugurating Demo-led SEO to the world — and with good reason. Our experiments with adding interactive demo to tutorial blog pages yielded HUGE results over a period of 90 days:

• 8x growth in traffic - 25k/mo to 200k/mo
• 53% of pages ranking in top 10 - and 19% in top 3 of the SERP
• And 106% MoM growth in signups from organic traffic

So far, we’ve explored the behind the scenes of Demo-led SEO and shared results on how Demo-led SEO pages compare to regular blogs. Now, let’s take a look at a few creative ways to include interactive demos as part of your existing content strategy.

3 ways to bring your blogs to life with interactive demos

As a rule of thumb, Demo-led SEO is a great fit for blogs or SEO-pages that involve product screenshots or videos. Here are three such opportunities.

1. Tutorial content

Demo-led SEO works well for “how-to” articles that address specific product questions. For example:

• how to use boolean search in LinkedIn Sales Navigator by Storylane 
• How to create a custom report on HubSpot by HubSpot
• how to use Gemini by Zapier

Let’s use Zapier's post to showcase where interactive demos would fit in. I’m using an interactive demo to highlight this so…things might get a little meta 😵💫

The article “How to use Gemini” uses product screenshots to visualize their tutorial. Screenshots are a great start, but replacing them with an interactive demo cuts time to value from a 10min read to a 1min guided tour — resulting in better user experience AND SEO performance. 

2. Category content

Next up, we have category-specific content such as competitor alternatives blogs, “best of” listicles, comparison articles, product reviews. For example:

• The 8 Best Calendly Alternatives by Chili Piper
• Asana vs Jira by Zapier
• 5 Best AI Meeting Assistants & Notetakers by Asana

These are popular bottom of the funnel assets designed to help target audiences with market research and (hopefully) try out your product. It’s easy to see why it’s so important to make a good impression with these blogs: albeit lower in volume, visitors are more likely to be in-market. Let’s take an example.

As an AI meeting assistant, it’s no surprise that Avoma features itself in its listicle of Top 5 AI Meeting Assistants in 2024. This is a great way to capture bottom of the funnel leads organically. However, in such cases, a product demo would do a much better job of converting visitors as compared to  a product screenshot. Moreover, such a demo would help differentiate from other listed products

3. Visual content

You’ve probably come across your fair share of “landing page examples”, “email copy teardowns”, and “strategy analysis” articles. Albeit not exactly product-specific, this type of content involves visual elements that may be captured and turned into interactive demos. For example:

• Content strategy examples by Ahrefs
• Best landing page examples by Unbounce
• ClickUp homepage teardown by Demand Curve

Let’s see where demos can fit into this ClickUp landing page teardown

As part of its teardown, Demand Curve breakdown the landing page into several bite-sized screenshots before diving into the explanations for each fold. This gets the job done but results in a really, really long page. It’s also quite challenging for readers to make sense of the landing page in it's entirety.

An interactive demo could capture the entire landing page  and use guides (as I’ve done with the past three demos in this article) to walk users through different aspects of the page. This provides a MUCH more accessible and navigable experience — with a lot less scrolling.

Before we wrap up, it’s worth highlighting that this is far from an exhaustive list of use-cases with Demo-led SEO. We’re still discovering new opportunities to augment demos within our own content strategy, including:

• Case studies - show, don’t just tell how customers actually use your product
• Product updates - share interactive product experiences for new features
• Helps docs - Walk customer through how to succeed with your product

I’m excited to see other creative ways in which our customers leverage demos to boost SEO performance, improve UX, and drive more conversions. Let us know if you have any more ideas :)