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What is a good engagement rate for an interactive demo? The answer depends on your industry and on where the demo sits in your funnel. So here are the numbers.
- Engagement rate is engaged demo sessions as a share of total demo sessions (aka views)
- CTA click rate is CTA clicks as a share of engaged sessions.
- Lead conversion rate is leads captured as a share of engaged sessions
- Company counts differ by row. Every row shows the count it was calculated on.
What a typical interactive demo achieves
Across 216 Storylane customers running 285 demo programmes, split by whether the demo runs in a marketing motion or a sales motion over the course of 30 days.
Read the median before the average, particularly on CTA. The CTA average sits around half again as high as the median because a handful of companies convert at several times the typical rate. A few industry rows below run the other way, with the median above the average. That is not a mistake in the table: it means a couple of weak performers are pulling that category's average down, so the median is the better description of a typical company.
By industry, marketing motion
These are demos running on websites, landing pages and campaigns. Median engagement ranges from 19.5% in customer service to 52.9% in specialised verticals, a spread of nearly three times.
Before reading that as a verdict on any category, audience composition is the more likely explanation. A dev tools demo on a public site absorbs a lot of casual traffic from developers who are curious rather than buying. A demo for a niche vertical product is seen by a smaller and far more self-selected group.
Each row rests on eight to ten companies, so treat the ordering as directional. A two-point gap between neighbouring rows is noise. A twenty-point gap is not. Industries with fewer than eight companies are left out.
By industry, sales motion
These are demos used inside a sales cycle as leave-behinds, follow-ups and POC replacements. Only one industry has the marketing demo clearly ahead of the sales demo: specialised verticals, at 52.9% against 29.5%. Manufacturing is effectively a tie, 43.5% against 42.9%. In both cases the product is sold to a narrow, well-defined audience, so the public-facing demo is already reaching mostly qualified people.
This table has ten rows rather than fourteen because four industries had fewer than eight companies running a sales-motion demo.
How to use these numbers
- Find your row, not the overall number. A 25% engagement rate is below average in manufacturing and comfortably above average in dev tools.
- Use the row that matches your use case. If your demo is on a landing page, the sales-motion benchmark is not your benchmark.
- Treat a low CTA rate as normal and a high one as a signal. Around 5% of engaged sessions is typical in both motions. Above 11% puts you in the top quartile, and whatever you are doing with CTA placement is worth writing down internally.
- Check the median against the average in your row. A wide gap means the best companies in your category are doing much better than the typical one.
- If engagement is under 20%, look at traffic mix before you look at the demo. A demo can be excellent and still show a low engagement rate if most of the people opening it were never candidates to buy.