There isn't "an" answer. You need to test and explore. I've seen nice online demos make significant differences to final revenue. I've also seen them make zero

There isn't "an" answer. You need to test and explore. I've seen nice online demos make significant differences to final revenue. I've also seen them make zero difference. Depends on the product and the market and the quality of the demo. One issue with a/b testing something like this is that the cost to do a good online demo can be non-trivial - and judging whether it can be a success can be non-obvious without doing a good online demo first. Egg. Chicken. Chicken. Egg. If I were me I might go about it something like this (assuming that building the demo feature isn't trivial - in which case just a/b test it :-) 0) I'd already be doing quick'n'dirty usability testing and talking with users regularly. This is even faster at showing up low-hanging fruit than a/b testing in many situations. I'd want some hint that the kinds of problems demos solve (e.g. not understanding what the product did) were showing up and there were no bigger fish to fry. 1) I'd guesstimate how much time/money it would take to build a good online demo. 2) I'd guesstimate how much of an increase in final conversion it would take for it to be worth while taking that time (considering that I could be building other features). 3) I'd add a "demo" button. I'd have it link to a "demo coming soon" page with an email signup so I could grab some "demo wanting" users for future quizzing. I'd split test that to see if anybody clicked on the demo button. 4) I now know what percentage of people are even vaguely interested in an online demo. So I have an upper bound for how much of an increase in conversions it could make. If it's worse than the number I came up with that would make it worthwhile - I can stop now. 5) I also now know whether "demo seeking" potential customers convert better/worse/same than non-demo-seeking potential customers. 6) I'd probably go talk to the demo-seeking users I gather on the e-mail list no matter what - to find out more about why they wanted the demo. Did they not understand the product? Were they looking for a particular feature? Did they want to play to figure out whether it was worth the money? Something else? Maybe you can fix their problem without building the demo. Maybe everybody wants to know whether it has FooFeature and you just need to add a bullet point to the home page. 7) From the previous step I now know more about why folk want an online demo. I'd try and build as little as possible to fix that particular problem. Stick that on the demo page - and see if we got any more conversions in the next round of testing. Repeat until no longer improving :-)