Automated Product Walkthroughs: Examples, tools & tips [2025].

Product walkthroughs are clickable step by step guides that allow users to get hands-on experience with a particular product or software. They can be used for onboarding & customer support or marketing & sales. Unlike live demos, automated product walkthroughs enable users to explore the product at their own pace, whenever they want.

How to automate product walkthroughs?

If you use a tool like HowdyGo, it’s pretty easy:

• Capture your product with the Chrome extension. Every time you click, a step is created, capturing your product at that point in time in full HTML/CSS.
• Edit absolutely anything in your captured flow. It’s not a video, so you can fully edit the captured UI, change click positions, reorder or delete steps.
• Add interactive elements like tooltips, video narration and chapters to guide the viewer through the flow.
• Share or embed the walkthrough in your app by copying and pasting the embed code.

Best product walkthrough examples

Here are some of our favourite examples across a variety of use-cases taken from our ultimate list of product walkthrough examples.

Flagsmith - Marketing walkthrough

Flagsmith's product walkthrough is offered on their landing page as well as in their demo center (built with HowdyGo’s collections feature). Interestingly, even though this demo is only used in their marketing materials, it resulted in improved onboarding and activation rate as prospects were better informed about their product before signing up.

Flagsmith achieved some impressive results:

• 1.7x lift in website’s conversion rate
• 1.5x lift in user activation rate post signup
• Over 90% completion rate

Komo - High-level onboarding walkthrough

Komo uses product walkthroughs across both onboarding and marketing. This very example is actually used on both their landing page to introduce visitors to their product and also in-app to show new users how to create their first activation hub.

HIVO - Feature-specific onboarding walkthrough

HIVO offers a catalog of feature specific walkthroughs for all new signups to their asset management platform. These tours are available under a help page but also contextually throughout their app via help icons.

More use-cases for product walkthroughs

There are so many use-cases for product walkthroughs that it can sometimes feel overwhelming to just know where to start. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started:

• User onboarding guides: Well-crafted product walkthroughs can lead to increased activation rates and user retention when provided in-app or throughout support documentation. They’re much more engaging than the traditional walls of text and screenshots.
• Website/landing page embeds: Embedding walkthroughs to your landing page is one of the best ways to show your product in action and increase conversion rates.
• Demo centers: If you have multiple product walkthroughs focussing on different features or use cases, you can create a demo center on your website that can serve as a knowledge base both for your potential customers and existing ones. This allows visitors to choose the walkthroughs they’re interested in from a list and only takes a few minutes to pull together using HowdyGo’s demo collections.
• Social media videos & GIFS: With a single click, you can export your walkthroughs into video formats optimized for social media and email newsletters. These make great little teasers for new features and are especially powerful when coupled with a link to the full feature walkthrough.
• Live demos: You can use product walkthroughs for live demos if you’re showing features not available in your production environment.

Best product walkthrough software

The best tool really depends on the use-case(s) you have in mind. We’ve written up an extensive list of product walkthrough tools but here is a quick summary.

If you’re building marketing walkthroughs - HowdyGo

HowdyGo captures your product in full HTML & CSS and lets you create walkthroughs on top of it. These can then be embedded or launched from any webpage, not from just inside your product. But best of all, when you update your UI, these tours don’t break as they serve a copy of your product captured at a specific point in time.

Here’s a quick product walkthrough of HowdyGo (and built with HowdyGo) showing you how it works.

If you’re building in-app onboarding walkthroughs - Userpilot

Userpilot walkthroughs occur right inside your live production app. They point the user to live UI elements and get them to perform actions in your live environment. Here’s a quick example of a tour built with Userpilot:

This can be a great UX but comes with some limitations:

• Users must be signed into your product in order to access the tour
• Changes in your UI can break the tour and cause problems that are hard to detect as you don’t regularly check that onboarding tours are running correctly
• Some users can find in-app tours intrusive, as you might force a new user through a flow that they might not be wanting to go through yet

If you’re looking to build both - HowdyGo

The best thing about product walkthroughs is how flexible they are, so it’s wise to keep your options open. You might want to improve your onboarding right now, but why not try to improve your website conversions later down the track?

With HowdyGo, you can embed tours in-app or on your support documentation to improve your onboarding experience, but you can also embed them across your marketing materials to improve conversion rates.

How to measure the success of your walkthroughs

Creating your product walkthrough is just the first step. One of the most powerful features of tools like HowdyGo is that they provide you with step by step engagement analytics that you can use to optimize them over time.

Here are the key metrics you should track for both marketing and onboarding walkthroughs:

• Impressions: Tracking the number of people who've seen your walkthrough helps you understand its reach. The more reach the better, as long as users are engaging.
• User engagement: What share of users has engaged with at least one step of your walkthrough? This helps you understand if it is well positioned on the page and whether it’s relevant to users or not.
• Completion rate: What share of engaged users complete your walkthrough? If the percentage of users who complete it is high, that's a good sign. If it's low, you should optimize the walkthrough by adding more engaging steps, or dividing it into separate, shorter tours.
• Drop-off points: Identifying points where people exit the walkthrough before completion can help you optimize these sections and remove friction. Look into these points to see whether those parts of your demo are too slow or whether they're too complicated or confusing.
• Time spent: Analyze how much time users spend on the walkthrough. Too little time might indicate they've just rushed through the tour, while too much time might suggest that some parts of the tour are confusing.
• Return rate: Measure the percentage of users who come back to watch the product walkthrough again. If you’re running onboarding tours, a high return rate is a sign that perhaps your product or walkthrough is too confusing, while if you’re running marketing walkthroughs it’s a good sign as these repeat viewers are more likely to convert into paying customers.

If you’re looking at marketing walkthroughs, then you should also consider:

• Click-through rate: Measure how many users click the CTA that's inviting them to sign up or book a call. We suggest placing multiple CTAs, not only at the end of the walkthrough but also throughout it, so that you can see which ones get the most conversions.
• Number of leads: Add lead-capture forms in your product walkthrough and track how many people leave you their contact information. You could A/B test different lead-capture forms and see for example whether the response rate is higher when you ask for email or phone number.

Best practices for effective product walkthroughs

There’s a number of tips that can help you create a great product walkthrough, here are a few of our favorites.

1. Segment your viewers

You should segment users into different groups. If your product is intended both for newbies and experienced professionals it doesn't mean the same walkthrough will work for both groups. 

That's why you need two demos, or two versions of the same walkthrough, which you can easily do with HowdyGo.

2. Personalize for your audience

People love to feel special and personalization is still one of the most effective marketing strategies. Then, why not personalize your product tours by adding customers' names, names of their companies, company logos, right into the walkthrough?

3. Use interactivity to drive engagement

If you want to create an engaging product walkthrough, interactive elements are a must. You should add clickable buttons, animations, tooltips, fields to fill out, etc. Also, don't forget to add a navigation that will allow users to skip a step and move forward, or go back to revisit a particular step.

4. Optimize for different devices

You should always keep in mind that users will engage with your walkthrough from a multitude of different devices and screen sizes. So when you capture your walkthrough, keep mobile devices in mind and check how your tours look on smaller screens.

Conclusion

Interactive product walkthroughs have many benefits and even more use-cases. You don't need to be an expert in order to create effective product walkthroughs. With a user-friendly tool like HowdyGo, you can capture and build one out in minutes. Try out HowdyGo for free and see what you can do for yourself!

FAQs

What is the difference between product tour and walkthrough?

The terms "product tour" and "walkthrough" are often used interchangeably, but there's a difference. Product tours provide an overview of a platform and its key features, like a demo. Product walkthroughs are more interactive, as they encourage users to actively try out the tool and test its features instead of passively watching a demo.

What are product tours?

Product tours are demos that guide users through mobile or web apps, explaining to them how to use the product and how to get the most out of it.

How to give a walkthrough?

There are different approaches. You can guide users through a platform explaining its key features. Or, you could show them how to do something with your product, using the chance to showcase its features and strengths. It's important to allow users to choose their own pace, by allowing them to skip some steps, etc.