The Plot

This Plot report analyzes over 110,257 web sessions and 150 deals across anonymized data to measure the impact of interactive demos on conversion rates and sales velocity. ‍Our approach is simple. We’re comparing the performance of prospects that engage with an interactive demo against the overall average from our dataset.

In summary

Based on our dataset, when prospects engage with an interactive demo, their…

• Website conversion rates improve by 7.9x (3.05% vs 24.35%)
• Deal conversion rate improves by 3.2x (3.1% vs 10.1%)
• Sales velocity surges, with sales cycles reducing from 33 to 27 days

Methodology

1. With Factors.ai, we built anonymized funnels to measure how prospects progress from website sessions to form submissions to deal conversions (from CRM data).
2. We then compared this data against prospects that were exposed to Storylane demos to measure the impact of interactive demos on conversion rates and sales velocity.

1. Website conversion rate

In our sample, website visitors that engaged with an interactive demo achieved a website conversion rate (sign-up, form submission, etc.) of 24.35%. That’s nearly 8x greater than the dataset’s average website conversion rate of 3.05%. Big.

Prospects that engage with interactive demos naturally demonstrate higher intent than casual visitors. That being said, the data clearly shows that interactive demos have a significant  impact on conversion rates. Prospects that test-drive the product through interactive demos are consistently more likely to sign-up as compared to those limited by static content.

2. Deal conversion rate

Sign-ups are great, but do interactive demos impact bottom-line revenue metrics? According to the data, the answer is a resounding yes. Prospects who engaged with interactive demos along their customer journeys achieved a deal conversion rate of 10.1%—3.2x more than the average (3.1%) rate in our sample.

Interactive demos don't just drive sign-ups — they substantially impact pipeline and revenue outcomes. It’s easy to see why. Demo automation eliminates friction between prospects and products with on-demand product experiences across stakeholders.

3. Sales velocity

Sales velocity measures how quickly a deal is closed—from first touch to deal won. Again, the data confirms what makes intuitive sense: by enabling prospects to explore products independently, interactive demos reduce the usual back-and-forth of emails and calls and streamline the sales cycle.

On average, deals that otherwise took 33 days were closed in just 27 days when interactive demo touchpoints were involved. This means that nearly an entire week is saved for both buyers and sellers per deal. As you might imagine, this really starts to add up over time.

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. 

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 :)

Conference season is here! If your company is hosting an event or a booth, you've probably noticed that standing out in a crowded in-person environment is easier said than done.

Our customers are increasingly adopting Storylane to address this challenge; so we thought it might be helpful to share this quick checklist on how to attract, engage and convert conference goers with interactive demos.

Key takeaways

1. Set your in-booth demos on autoplay
2. Download your demos for offline use
3. Include forms to streamline lead gen
4. Use QR codes to improve accessibility
5. Service a broader audience with Demo Hub

Why use interactive demos at events, booths, and conferences?

There are several reasons why interactive demos work so well at in-person events.

• For one, they stand out from the usual product decks, brochures, and videos.
• More importantly, they let conference goers experience the product’s value on their own accord — with minimal sales intervention.
• Also, as compared to live demos, interactive demos provide a safe and flexible product environment for smooth, guided discovery.

5-point checklist for interactive demos at events, booths, and conferences

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1. Improve foot traffic with autoplay demos

Conference attendees don’t want another branded water bottle or pad of paper — they want to see innovative products like yours in action. Set your in-booth demos on autoplay to attract attention, improve foot traffic, and give attendees a relevant, hands-on product experience.

How it works: To set up Autoplay, toggle the Auto play demos option under the CONFIG menu of your demo settings.

2. Secure your product experience with offline demos

Remember that one time Steve Jobs ran into an unexpected internet issue during his keynote presentation for the iPhone? Well, if spotty Wi-Fi can affect the largest technology company in the world, there’s a good chance it can affect your product walkthroughs and presentations as well. 

Also, can we take a minute to talk about the Wi-Fi prices at these events and conferences? Especially given their unreliability, conference Wi-Fi can be absurdly expensive; as much as $2,000 per day! Yeesh!

This is where Storylane’s offline demos help. Offline demos support interactive demos even without an active internet connection. This is an effective way to avoid tedious ops works, awkward product crashes, and exorbitant Wi-Fi charges  — all in a single click.

How it works: Select “Download offline” to create a demo link. Once downloaded, you needn't worry about refreshing the page or losing progress during outages.

It’s also worth noting that Storylane doesn't require any additional software to work offline. These demos are built to run directly on your browser via a shareable URL — anytime, anywhere. 

3. Convert prospects on the spot with lead gen forms

Interactive demos can encourage attendees to convert on the spot during events and conferences. Prospects are usually happy to share their contact details in exchange for relevant product demos.

If your booth receives a lot of foot traffic, make sure to include a lead gen form in your demos. This is a good way to capture leads, even when your on-ground sales team is occupied with other prospects. Alternatively, offer to share a guided demo to high-intent prospects via email, LinkedIn, etc. to initiate  personalized nurturing efforts.

How it works: Head over to “Guide” on Storylane’s demo editor, add a step, select the screen of your choice, and pick “lead form” as your guide of choice. You can either use Storylane’s lead gen form or embed your own custom form. 

4. Empower better buyer enablement with QR codes

Furnish your booth, swag, presentations, and other marketing efforts with QR codes linked to interactive demos. This is a low-lift, non-invasive approach for prospects to take your product back home with them.

For one, this helps prospects review your product in their own time, rather than rushing through a demo at a busy booth. For another, this helps prospects share your demo with the rest of their team async.

How it works: Once you publish your demo, simply copy and enter the link into a QR code generator of your choice. Distribute this QR code across your marketing efforts to improve visibility and engagement.

5. Address multiple buyer personas and use-cases with Demo Hub

A single demo is rarely enough to convert multiple buyer personas. Accordingly, we recommend creating demo hubs as a centralized repository to address a range of audiences and use-cases simultaneously. Here’s a little more on how SentinelOne, a leading cyber security company, goes about this:

SentineOne created a demo-enabled “GeniusBar” kiosk at this year's RSA conference. This involved several iPads, displays, and on-ground sales reps showcasing Storylane demos to prospects while on the move. Since Storylane is device agnostic, prospects had a clean, true-to-life product experience.

How it works: Head over to "Demo Hub" in Storylane, and select "+ Create Hub" to get started. We typically recommend the Gallery layout for quick and snappy in-booth use-cases.

6. Bonus tips to make the most of your conference demos

Before signing off, here are a few short bonus tips to keep in mind when creating interactive demos for your next booths and conferences

• Build a narrative: Like the interactive demos that go on your website, your conference demos should tell a relevant story about the pain-points and use-cases that your product solves for. Tailor this narrative based on the nature of the conference and its attendees.
• Keep it short: Conferences are busy, jam packed affairs. Attendees are usually short on time, and even shorter on attention spans. Keep your demos concise and highlight only the most valuable, differentiated aspects of your product.
• Clean up the data: Needless to say, it’s important that your interactive demos reflect your product in the best possible light. Use the HTML editor to blur sensitive information and update the data and copy.
• Enable speakers: Using the real product during panel discussions or breakout sessions can be precarious, especially when you're presenting to a large, highly qualified audience. Storylane enables speakers with pre-curated demo flows, in-built presenter notes, and safe demo environments.

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.

This is a guide to everything you need to know about our biggest product launch yet: Demo Hub! Explore motivations, use-cases, and best practices so you too, can have your socks knocked off 🧦

One demo is not enough

Imagine your favorite TV show (Mine’s The Sopranos) crammed into a single, continuous body of work. No episodes. No seasons. Just 80+ hours of unyielding content. Doesn’t sound very fun, does it?

A similar intuition may be applied to the B2B buying experience. You, me, and most other buyers usually prefer multiple, bite sized content assets over a singular, “one-size-fits-all” model. It’s easy to see why:

1. Many, not one: A single blog, video, or in our case, interactive demo is rarely enough to educate or convert buyers. Instead, buyers prefer consuming multiple content pieces before a purchase.
2. Divide & conquer: A collection of segmented assets is easier to consume, provides quicker time to value, and is better navigable across buyer personas than an overwhelming, all-in-one asset.

These two observations (qualified over several conversations with customers) motivated the creation of Demo Hub: A centralized resource to facilitate better product discovery, education, and adoption. 

What is Demo Hub?

A Demo Hub is a centralized repository of interactive demos to showcase multiple features and use-cases under a single, navigable roof. Demo Hubs also support G2 reviews, lead gen forms, chatbots, and schedulers to improve the on-page experience. Demo Hubs come in two layouts: Gallery & Playlist.

Gallery

The gallery layout is an SEO-friendly landing page with a grid structure. This layout organizes demos into multiple sections, usually segmented by use-cases, buyer personas, funnel stages etc. Galleries are recommended for marketing efforts involving multiple buyer personas and use-cases. Here’s an example:

Playlist

The playlist layout is a sequential list of demos that can be curated for prospects based on relevance. This layout offers more control in terms of the order of demos and overall narrative. Playlists are recommended for sales and CS use-cases involving multiple products and bespoke flows. For example:

Both layouts are helpful, but you may prefer one over the other based on your objectives + use-cases. Speaking of use-cases, this next section explores the usage of Demo Hub across marketing, sales, and CS.

Demo Hub Use-cases

Marketing

Educating a target audience on a complex software product can be challenging. Demo Hub works as a unified repository of features and use-cases to simplify this process for buyers and sellers alike. 

Website visitors needn’t jump between product pages, explainer videos, G2 reviews, and lead gen forms. Simply organize the relevant demos and resources under one roof to refine the customer experience. Also, hubs may be used as a demand generation asset for paid ads, socials, and content/SEO efforts.

Suggested layout: Gallery

Sales

Prospects are usually interested in multiple product features. Rather than tediously sharing sales enablement assets for each one, create chapters of everything your product does in one place.

For one, this helps prospects champion your product by showcasing relevant use-cases for every stakeholder within a buying committee. It also empowers your partners and resellers to better promote your product, based on feature and persona-specific demos. 

Suggested layout: Playlist

Customer success

Product documentation can be overwhelming and tutorial videos are difficult to scale. Demo Hub is a great alternative to these common customer success challenges. Create Hubs based on various categories of tasks (Onboarding, integrations, troubleshooting, report building, etc) to support customers with interactive, self-paced product walkthroughs.

Suggested layout: Playlist

Demo Hub Best Practices

Here are a couple of best practices to keep in mind when building your own Demo Hub

• Persona and product base: Divide your hubs based on buyer personas (persona-based hub) and/or product (use-cases and features). This improves navigability as users can quickly identify demos that are most relevant to them. At a high-level, you may want to create dedicated hubs for your champions, end-users, and decision makers, each addressing relevant use-cases. 
• < 9 demos per hub - Limit the total number of demos on each hub to under 9. Remember, you’re aiming to improve customer experience by breaking down an otherwise overwhelming product into consumable chunks. You don’t want to overwhelm prospects with too many chunks either!
• 3 sections per hub - Good things come in threes. We recommend creating 3 sections per hub for a satisfying, memorable, and effective content structure. For example, in our case, we may want to divide our persona-based demo hub into: “marketing”,  “sales”, and “customer success”.

And there you have it! Demo Hub is a powerful value addition to virtually every stage of the customer journey. Build your first hub in minutes. Start free. 

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.

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.

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.