Are your product demos working?

Interactive product demos let prospects experience your product in their own time. This can increase engagement, improve lead quality, and help buyers understand your product faster.

Interactive demos can tie directly to measurable impact. This playbook gives you frameworks for measuring the performance of interactive demos, setting up tooling to capture the metrics you need, and reporting results to stakeholders.

Measuring interactive demos and their impact

A good rule of thumb is to choose 3-5 metrics to focus on when you’re looking at interactive demos. Choose metrics based on:

• How marketing performance is measured (and how you are measured) 
• The business outcomes your leadership cares about (and what they particularly care about right now)
• What sales and product stakeholders want to understand.

We’ll break the metrics down into three buckets:

• Demo engagement metrics
• Wider business KPIs
• Signals and qualitative indicators.

Choosing metrics across these buckets gives you a complete picture of demo performance. It will also make sure you’re measuring and reporting back to stakeholders in a way that’s aligned with what they’re focused on. 

1. Demo engagement metrics

Demo engagement metrics tell you how prospects are interacting with the demos you publish. Engagement metrics alone don’t prove revenue impact, but they’re a key piece of the puzzle and are often a leading signal that the demos are actually working. 

The key demo engagement metrics to track:

Impressions 

This is the number of people who have seen your demos. You can view aggregated impressions for all of your demos or look into one specific demo to see impressions over time. 

Progression

Progression metrics show you which aspects of your demo people are engaging with and where they are dropping off/might be getting confused. The goal is to help people explore the entire demo and take an action, so demo data will give you signals for where to do things like adjust the content. It will look something like this:

Completions

Demo completion rates tell you how many people are getting to the end of the demo. This rate will vary a lot depending on the context. Intent, purchasing stage, and things like whether or not you have gated forms at the end of the demo can all impact your demo completion rate. 

Actions taken by leads

The underlying goal of an interactive demo is generally to get a user to perform an action. With a CTA button in your demo, you can measure actions taken by users (and look at things like which buttons they’re clicking on, proportionally how many people click on a CTA vs reaching the end of the demo, and so on). 

2. Metrics that tie demos to the funnel and wider business objectives

Once demos are live, the next step is tracking (and demonstrating) how they influence business goals downstream, especially when speaking to stakeholders.

Here are some metrics you can track related to demos. Hover for a suggestion on how you can calculate/find this data.

Demand gen metrics

Lead metrics 

Pipeline/revenue influenced by demo engagement

Product metrics (e.g. if using for new feature launches)

3. Signals and qualitative indicators 

Many important signals aren’t directly attributable and don’t show up on dashboards. With interactive demos, there are signals that will be felt through the GTM team (e.g. for sales as they talk to leads).

Here are a few signals worth paying attention to:

Example templates for what to report on (and when)

Metrics for when you’re getting started - example target metrics for a 2-3 month pilot

Metrics to share what other teams track when they implement interactive demos 

If your stakeholders are looking for examples from other teams, here are three metrics HowdyGo customers have reported:

• 1.7x more app signups 
• 1.5x more activations
• >90% demo engagement
• 30% more upsell requests

Set up data and integrations for reporting

To measure demo performance effectively, it’s helpful to connect demo activity to the rest of your marketing and sales data stack.

Two integrations are especially useful: analytics platforms and CRMs.

Sending demo data to analytics tools 

Connecting demo data to analytics tools like Heap gives you a clearer view of what people are doing with your product demos. This allows you to:

1. Track demo activity 

See when prospects start demo sessions, how far into demos they’re getting, if they’re clicking on CTAs.

This shows you how people are engaging with the demos (and highlights things like where people are getting stuck/confused). 

2. Track conversions 

Compare outcomes and measure conversions for users who’ve engaged with demos vs. users who haven’t. 

This tells you whether demo engagement ties to higher conversion rates, and gives you some insight into downstream impact. 

Linking demo data with your CRM 

Sending demo data to your CRM can make a lot of your GTM workflows a ton richer. Connect demo activity with real contacts, accounts, and opportunities. To get the most out of your demo data, set up the following:

1. Lead capture and enrichment
   Connect demos to tools like HubSpot to create and update your lead data. This gives you stronger lead tracking and lets you see how leads are actually engaging with your demos. 
2. 1. Automatically create or update contacts when leads interact with your demos
   2. Track demo activity in timeline events, form submissions, or custom contact properties
2. Lead scoring
   Use demo engagement metrics to add depth to your lead scoring, since you can now score leads based on the depth of their demo engagement. 
3. 1. Assign different lead scoring amounts to things like:
   2. 1. Clicking on a CTA button in a demo   
      2. Visiting a dedicated demo page
      3. Starting a demo session
      4. Completing a demo

What does all of this do for marketers?

All of this gives you more information to help you speak to prospects in a more targeted way and get the right people moving through the funnel. In practice it looks like:

• Targeted messaging based on prospect behavior 
• More relevant nurture and follow-up campaigns
• Arming sales with clearer insight into account behavior
• Passing better-qualified leads to sales 

Instead of guessing what your prospects care about, you can see how they actually experience your product.

Tl;Dr and how other teams do it 

Interactive demos can become a core part of how your GTM team educates and converts prospects. With the right measurement frameworks in place, you can show impact accurately and share results consistently. 

If you want to see how other teams have added demos and HowdyGo to their processes and reporting, here are some stories to look through.