The Plot

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.

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.

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