There’s a reason why the interactive demo market is one of the fastest-growing categories in software → Interactive demos help SaaS companies 👇
- Convert more traffic into sign-ups/sales leads
- Increase product activation rates
- Drive more expansion and retention from existing customers
This guide covers the most revealing interactive demo statistics your team needs to know ahead of 2025, so you can get the most out of your product tours.
For example, did you know that? ⤵️
Users who interacted with a product tour are 80% more likely to take multiple activation steps in your product.
Before we dive into the individual statistics, let’s explore what makes a high-performing product tour.
TLDR: What Great Interactive Demos Have in Common
We’ve analyzed 37,000 interactive demos to paint of picture of what generally makes a high-performing one.
High performing = drive business impact for you.
Business impact can be:
- Conversions (signing up, booking a demo, etc.)
- Lift in activation rates
- New feature adoption
- Etc.
Here’s what “average” looks like:
Play rate (Number of people who get past the first step) → 38%
Completion rate (Out of people who start a demo, the number of people who finish) → 58%
Final CTR (The percentage of viewers who take action) → 8%
Minutes watches (Time spent engaging with your demo) → 0.32 minutes
Here’s what the top 25% looks like:
Play rate (Number of people who get past the first step) → 63% (1.66x ↗️)
Completion rate (Out of people who start a demo, the number of people who finish) → 74% (1.28x ↗️)
Final CTR (The percentage of viewers who take action) → 16% (2x ↗️)
Minutes watches (Time spent engaging with your demo) → 0.52 minutes (1.63x ↗️)
Top 1% Interactive Demos
Play rate (Number of people who get past the first step) → 98% (2.58x ↗️)
Completion rate (Out of people who start a demo, the number of people who finish) → 100% (1.72x ↗️)
Final CTR (The percentage of viewers who take action) → 67% ( 🏆 8.38x ↗️)
Minutes watches (Time spent engaging with your demo) → 0.32 minutes (🏆 11x ↗️)
Interactive Demo Statistics You Need to Know in 2025
1. Adding an intro chapter to an interactive demo increases the play rate by 72%.
Why?
▶️ Expectation management.
Chapters let viewers know what they should expect and choose what they want to learn next. Leveraging chapters is much more effective than generic one-size-fits-all demos.
Here’s an example:
Source: Arcade proprietary data, 2024.
2. The best-performing interactive demos have 12 steps and 9 product images.
The number of steps is the most significant factor in driving a higher completion rate. From our analysis, the typical number of steps in an Arcade was 12.
As you add more steps, we usually see a drop in completion rates. Our research shows that the top 1% of demos have 16% fewer steps than the median demo.
💡 Pro tip: Mix videos and product images for even better results.
Example from Hunter:
Source: Arcade proprietary data, 2024.
3. CTR is 2x higher for the top 25% performing demos, 3.38x higher for the top 10%, and 8.38x higher for the top 1%.
This is perhaps the most critical statistic on this list because you care about business outcomes when creating interactive product tours. Otherwise, we’d stick to the status quo.
What this tells us is that viewers will take exponentially more actions if your demo is world-class.
In an Arcade, there are 4x options for driving action:
- Logo (top left)
- Share CTA button (top right)
- Watermark (bottom right)
- Button (chapter step)
Furthermore, here are the most commonly used CTR phrases in best-performing interactive demos:
Source: Arcade proprietary data (2024).
3. 89% of visitors will interact with a product demo on a dedicated landing page.
According to HowdyGo research, 89% of visitors will interact with a product demo on a landing page.
This is massive, considering that the average landing page conversion rate is 5.89% (HubSpot).
The closest page element that positively impacts conversion rates is videos, at 38.6%.
This means that interactive demos should be heavily considered when launching product pages.
🕹️ Learn how Skilljar reimagined their website demos with Arcade.
4. 55% of users engage when demos are embedded into an existing web page.
The same study found that 55% of users engage when demos are embedded into an existing web page.
Our take: Marketers should invest in converting website assets into interactive assets.
What’s more engaging for prospects? ⤵️
5. Inbound leads are 70% more likely to sign up for a trial when they view a demo.
The holy grail for marketers?
We think so. It’s much easier to convert more of the traffic you already have than to generate more new eyeballs on your site. Leads are 70% more likely to sign up for your product after viewing a demo.
🕹️ Learn how Labelbox Increased MQLs by 30% with Interactive Demos.
Here's an example:
Sources: HowdyGo & Labelbox & Arcade proprietary data (2024).
6. New users are 80% more likely to perform multiple activation steps after signing up.
This finding from HowdyGo correlates with our own research. We see time and time again our customers influence product activation when Arcades are involved in the pre-purchase or onboarding experience.
Our take: The type of demos need to be adjusted to where someone is in the customer journey.
TLDR:
Discovery stage = Tell a story about your platform. Show your top features.
Onboarding = Walk new users through key product steps and important activation milestones.
Expansion = Let users explore new features before they commit to trying them.
🕹️ Learn how Wrike’s onboarding demos boosted conversion by 65%.
Sources: HowdyGo & Wrike & Arcade proprietary data (2024).
7. Prospects get onto sales calls 2 weeks faster when they have viewed an interactive demo.
If you introduce interactive demos in the sales process, prospects will get on sales calls faster.
That’s what recent research from the team at Navattic tells us.
Our take: Demos are not only a way to have prospects experience your product before they buy; they can also be a powerful tool for capturing their information and retargeting them with tailored campaigns.
Source: Navattic.
8. The distribution between PLG and SLG companies having interactive demos is even.
According to research from Navattic, as many product-led (PLG) and sales-led (SLG) companies are leveraging interactive demos.
This isn’t surprising, but it shows the value for both.
Sales-led:
- Drive leads
- Give prospects context before demo calls
- Help prospects compare you with competitors
- Capture prospect information
- Etc.
Product-led:
- Drive sign-ups
- Increase adoption rates
- Help expand accounts to new users
- Facilitate self-learning in documentation material
- Etc.
Source: Navattic.
9. Interactive demos are driving 7.2x more engagement than videos
Why spend dozens of hours and thousands of dollars on agencies to create videos when you can create an interactive demo with better results?
The data tells us that. The average product tour drives 7.2x more click-through rate than the industry average for product marketing videos.
It's also true that some concepts are better expressed through videos. But teams should consider interactive assets when displaying the product.
Source: Arcade proprietary data (2024).
10. The top 10% typically included 1.4x more branching paths on intro chapters and included 1.2x more intro chapters than the median.
The top 10% of interactive demos use 1.4 times more branching paths and 1.2 times more intro chapters than the median demo.
Our take: The more you let prospects decide what they want next, the better your interactive demos will perform.
To do this, you can leverage:
- Intro chapters
- Branching
- Outro chapters
- Personalization
For example, here’s how to personalize your demos:
Source: Arcade proprietary data (2024).
12. Visuals matter: The top 10% of interactive demos include on-brand visuals and 9% more backgrounds.
Does your website reflect your brand? What about your website? Landing pages?
The same applies to interactive demos. The more stunning and on-par with your brand they are, the better they’ll perform. That’s what the data tells us this year.
Additionally, demos with sound typically performed 8% better on play rate than those without. Sound options include background music or synthetic voices.
Not to forget, as stated above, mixing up product screenshots with personalized video clips 📹 .
Source: Arcade proprietary data (2024).
13. Marketing teams can drive a 100% increase in pipeline by leveraging product tours in launches
Take Rudderstack, for example.
The company incorporated interactive demos in product launches and saw 3x more product adoption post-launch!
They also started utilizing product tours to train new sales team members on specific features. They supported sales engineering and business development training, making complex product functionalities easier to grasp.
Result ⤵️
- 83% faster certification and training for sales
- 2x sales pipeline from launches
- 3x adoption by existing customers
Source: Arcade proprietary data (2024).
14. Keep demos below 200 characters
Let us state the obvious: People’s attention spans are short, and that is reflected when dialog boxes are too lengthy in interactive demos.
According to Navattic, 78.5% of top-performing demos have dialog boxes that are shorter than 200 characters on average.
Source: Navattic & Arcade proprietary data (2024).
15. Ungated demos perform 5-20% better
You may have seen this from Elena Verna 👇
The same thing happens when prospects are engaged by sales because they passed an interactive demo gate.
The data tells us that letting people experience the value of your product through an ungated demo experience will lead to more lead captures at the end and higher receptivity from prospects to engage with the real product or request a call with sales.
Source: Navattic & Arcade proprietary data (2024).
How We Got These Statistics
These statistics come from our own analysis of 37,000 demos across 900 companies, along with data from other interactive demo vendors like Navattic and HowdyGo.
Across these sources, the top % of interactive demos were determined by:
- Plays → Number of views that passed the first step.
- Consumption → Completion rate & minutes watched.
- Click-through rate (CTR) → The percentage (%) of players who clicked on at least one CTA.
- Influence on KPIs → The impact that interactive demo engagement had on key business metrics like product activation and retention
Ready to put these to work? Try Arcade for free
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