How Glean got a 70% lift on their demo CTA
I sat down with Daniel Henderson, head of digital marketing at Glean, to learn about what has been working on their site in 2026.
Glean, an enterprise search and knowledge management platform founded in 2019, has achieved explosive growth and today has a remarkable $7.2 billion valuation.
I recently sat down with Daniel Henderson, their head of digital, to unpack what has been working on their website and to learn from their CRO experiments.
Let’s dive in.
The Integration Section
One area where Glean assessed a big gap on its site was its lack of an integration section.
Major competitors had these to show compatibility, but Glean didn’t have a dedicated homepage integration block.
While having an integration section (especially in enterprise) is a no-brainer, the data shows that for at-scale SaaS and fintech brands, the typical integration section that links out to another page gets less than >.5% of homepage clicks.
So Glean decided to build an interactive experience.
In their integration section, you can drag any of their connectors, and it shows you exactly how Glean works with that platform.
It’s simple and personalized to the prospect’s needs in the moment, without breaking the flow or making them leave the homepage.
For the 20-30% of the website traffic that makes it down this far on the page, they average 4 events (or interactions) at this section, which is dramatically higher engagement than normal for an integration section and a by-product of Glean’s seamless UX.
The demo CTA in the navigation
Glean pulled off one of the most remarkable lifts I have seen on a primary navigation CTA.
By adding a highlighting animation around the “Get a Demo” CTA that is part of the sticky top navigation bar (scrolls with you down the page), they got a 70% lift in Click-through-rate.
Not +.7%. Not +7%. Seventy percent lift.
It shows that visually differentiating CTAs on a busy page can draw folks to that action, and other teams, like Plaid, have also had success with visual hover effects on CTAs.
Mirror Exposure Effect
Next, we dip into psychology, where Daniel explains how they have found success promoting their virtual events from the homepage.
They start by priming the user with a first exposure to the virtual event in the top banner. They then follow with a dedicated media section below.
While our data at DoWhatWork’s shows that top banners, in general, perform poorly in SaaS and fintech…
The idea of the banner as being less focused on clicks and more as a visual primer for a follow-up touch further down the page is clever, and glad to see this worked for the Glean team.
Process Clarity for CTAs
The biggest overall lift of any major site change for Glean was actually a stunningly simple one.
They got a 166% CTR lift by doing something any brand reading this can go change on their own site in 5 minutes.
They cut out all their “Learn more” CTAs and replaced them with specific, clear CTAs → Watch a video, See Product Overview, View all Connectors etc..
Many of the major SaaS, from Salesforce to Hubspot, still use dozens of “Learn more” CTAs, and it’s a huge opportunity for optimization.
The rule of thumb for CTAs is simple…
What do I expect is going to happen next when I click this button? If it’s clear, you win. If it’s not, you get high bounce and fall-off.
“Learn more” or “get started” are not clear CTAs.
Get a Demo. See Pricing. Talk to Sales. See Integrations. Those are clear CTAs.
Apple, for example, tested “Start Listening” vs. “Try it Free”.
“Try it free” won because “start listening” didn’t actually lead to just listening to the music. It led to a trial form before you could start listening.
Persona Segmentation
One common question I get asked by brands is should I segment by industry? By role? By department? By size?
Glean segments by both department and industry, but was clear which path had the most engagement…
Department, by far, had the most resonance.
Prospects want to see the impact on them, in their department, in their role. How are they going to deliver a win for their organization?
They show this persona segmentation right below their hero, too, because it’s one of the key places traffic engages.
And this is part of a much larger trend in SaaS and fintech of brands moving persona sections further up on the page.
Carta redid their homepage, and now theirs is also right below the hero…
Brands like MongoDB and Sage have even moved to add personalization by persona options at the very top of the homepage hero…
Or
AI Experiments
As an innovative brand, Glean is constantly experimenting and testing around AI.
One area they just launched on the site a few weeks ago is having a “summarize with AI” option in the footer (and using prompt prefills)
When you click on one of those options, it opens in the LLM of your choice with the following prompt…
The idea of these sections is two-fold…
By controlling the prompt, you control the narrative of how a third-party environment talks about you. You can set what reference material to use too. The standard format for brands testing this seems to be “As a [persona], trying to solve [insert usecase], explain how [our company] solves for this. Use [insert homepage or relevant reference pages] to provide the answer”
There could be a longtail affect here. By adding this prompt into the prospect’s local LLM instance, the chances they cite that brand in the future may be higher
It’s too early to assess the impact of this section yet for Glean, but I love to see the experimentation mindset.
I talk about these types of AI experiments more here.
Overall, I loved getting a chance to learn how small, easy-to-implement changes have had an outsized impact in driving clicks and conversions for a brand of Glean’s scale.
Daniel notes that a lot of brands are leaving money on the table by not investing in CRO, stating, “Your website is your 24/7 salesperson. Make sure it’s optimized.”
Finally, Daniel notes that they have something new and innovative cooking with their monthly product drops, so stay tuned for that.
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