A demo account is a waypoint, not a result

A demo account opens in a minute, costs nothing, and commits you to nothing. That's exactly why it's so convenient to count: the number is big, grows fast, looks impressive in a report. And that's exactly why it tells you almost nothing.

01What demo-to-deposit conversion shows

Across our campaigns it ranges from 8 to 16 percent and varies between creators by a factor of three. Two channels with the same cost per demo end up with deposit costs of $200 and $600 — and there's no way to know this in advance except by running both to the money stage.

So for the first two or three weeks of a flight, demo accounts are useful: they come in quickly and show that the channel works at all. After that they stop being a reliable signal, and you need to optimize for deposits.

02Postback on deposit, not registration

Technically it's one line in the tracker settings; practically it's the line between "we're buying something" and "we're managing the buy." Without a postback on actual money, the system only sees the top of the funnel and recommends scaling what's cheaper, not what pays back.

The attribution window here is longer than you'd think: from demo to first deposit takes anywhere from a few days to six weeks. We lock the window at 30–60 days before the start and don't change it afterward — otherwise it always gets adjusted to fit whatever result you want to see.

03Why losses on screen work better than profits

The standard video shows a winning trade. The forex audience has seen this a thousand times and knows the other half of the story was left out.

Videos where the creator runs a demo account for a week and shows everything, including the down days, get higher retention and — more importantly — bring in people who don't churn after a month. The LTV gap between these two types of acquisition is large enough to outweigh the difference in acquisition cost threefold.

04Where the line is

Promising returns is off-limits in any form — not as a number, not with "up to," not with "on average." This isn't the agency being cautious: the advertiser is liable, and the complaint comes from a competitor. Scripts go through legal review before the shoot, not after publication.

The practical takeaway: if the product can't be sold without promising returns, the influencer channel won't help. It sells trust in the person, not in the number.