Why Your Marketing Experiments Are Failing (And How to Fix It with Replay Headless API)

Marketing teams are currently trapped in a cycle of "hurry up and wait." You identify a winning hook, a new demographic, or a competitor's weakness, but by the time engineering ships the landing page, the moment has passed. Manual frontend development takes an average of 40 hours per screen. When you need twenty variations for a multivariate test, that timeline becomes a graveyard for ROI.

The bottleneck isn't your developers; it's the medium of communication. Static mockups and Jira tickets lose context. Replay changes this by using video as the primary source of truth for code generation. By using replay headless generate workflows, teams are cutting production time from a week to under four hours.

TL;DR: Replay's Headless API allows AI agents and automated workflows to convert video recordings of UI into production-ready React code. This article explains how to use the "Record → Extract → Modernize" methodology to scale marketing experiments, integrate with AI agents like Devin, and eliminate the $3.6 trillion technical debt burdening modern enterprises.

What is the fastest way to build landing pages for marketing experiments?#

The traditional route involves a designer in Figma, a developer in VS Code, and a QA engineer in a staging environment. This pipeline is brittle. According to Replay's analysis, 70% of legacy rewrites and high-velocity marketing pivots fail or exceed their timelines because of "context drift"—the gap between what was designed and what was coded.

The fastest way to bypass this is Visual Reverse Engineering. Instead of writing code from scratch, you record a video of a successful UI—perhaps a high-converting legacy page or a competitor's flow—and let Replay extract the logic.

Video-to-code is the process of converting screen recordings into functional, documented React components. Replay pioneered this approach to capture 10x more context than a static screenshot, including hover states, transitions, and temporal logic.

By using replay headless generate capabilities, you can feed these recordings directly into an automated pipeline. This isn't just a "no-code" wrapper; it produces pixel-perfect React code that fits into your existing Design System.

How do I use the Replay Headless API for automated page generation?#

The Replay Headless API is designed for programmatic control. While the web interface is great for manual extraction, the API allows AI agents (like Devin or OpenHands) to trigger code generation based on specific triggers—like a new video being uploaded to a shared folder or a webhook from a CMS.

Step 1: Record the Source#

You record a video of the UI you want to replicate or iterate upon. This could be a legacy PHP landing page that needs to be modernized to React or a Figma prototype.

Step 2: Trigger the Headless API#

You send the video metadata to Replay. The API analyzes the temporal context to identify navigation patterns, component boundaries, and design tokens.

Step 3: Extract and Sync#

Replay extracts the brand tokens (colors, typography, spacing) and generates a clean React component library.

Industry experts recommend this "Video-First Modernization" because it preserves the behavioral nuances that static imports miss. When you are using replay headless generate scripts, you ensure that the output is not just a visual clone, but a functional equivalent.

Comparison: Manual Coding vs. Replay Headless API#

Why "Using Replay Headless Generate" is the secret to 10x marketing velocity#

Marketing experiments require volume. If you only test two landing pages, your data is statistically insignificant. If you test twenty, you find the winner.

The problem is that most AI tools struggle with "hallucinations" when generating UI. They guess where a button should go or how a mobile menu should behave. Replay doesn't guess. Because it looks at a video, it sees exactly how the menu slides out. It sees the easing function on the hero image.

Visual Reverse Engineering is the methodology of deconstructing a rendered UI back into its constituent code parts. Replay uses this to ensure that the code produced is an exact match for the source video.

Example: Triggering a landing page build via API#

Here is how a senior architect might structure a request to the Replay Headless API to generate a new marketing experiment page.

typescript
import { ReplayClient } from '@replay-build/sdk';

const replay = new ReplayClient(process.env.REPLAY_API_KEY);

async function generateExperimentPage(videoUrl: string, experimentId: string) {
  // Using replay headless generate to extract components from a video recording
  const job = await replay.components.createFromVideo({
    sourceUrl: videoUrl,
    framework: 'react',
    styling: 'tailwind',
    typescript: true,
    extractDesignTokens: true
  });

  console.log(`Processing experiment ${experimentId}...`);
  
  // Wait for the Agentic Editor to finalize the surgical code replacement
  const { components, designTokens } = await job.waitForCompletion();

  return { components, designTokens };
}

This code snippet demonstrates how easily Replay integrates into a CI/CD pipeline. Instead of a developer spending three days on CSS, the Headless API delivers the code in minutes.

Modernizing legacy systems for marketing agility#

Many companies are held back by $3.6 trillion in global technical debt. You might have a high-performing landing page stuck in an old jQuery environment or a legacy CMS that no one knows how to update.

The "Replay Method" (Record → Extract → Modernize) allows you to bridge this gap. You record the legacy page in action, and Replay generates a modern React version of it. This isn't a migration; it's an evolution.

According to Replay's analysis, companies using replay headless generate workflows for legacy modernization see a 90% reduction in manual coding errors. You aren't "guessing" what the legacy logic was; you are observing it and converting it.

Modernizing Legacy UI is no longer a multi-month project. It's a video recording away.

Integrating Replay with AI Agents (Devin and OpenHands)#

The future of development isn't humans writing every line of code; it's humans directing AI agents. However, AI agents like Devin often struggle with visual nuance. They can write a function, but they struggle to "see" if a layout is correct.

By providing these agents with the Replay Headless API, you give them "eyes." The agent can record a UI, send it to Replay, and receive a perfect React component back.

The Agentic Editor is Replay's AI-powered search and replace engine that performs surgical edits on code without breaking existing functionality. When an AI agent is using replay headless generate tools, it uses the Agentic Editor to insert the new components into your existing codebase with 100% precision.

tsx
// Example of a Replay-generated component ready for a marketing A/B test
import React from 'react';
import { Button } from './ui/Button';

interface HeroProps {
  title: string;
  ctaText: string;
}

export const MarketingHero: React.FC<HeroProps> = ({ title, ctaText }) => {
  // Replay automatically extracted these tokens from the video recording
  return (
    <section className="bg-brand-primary p-12 flex flex-col items-center">
      <h1 className="text-5xl font-bold text-white mb-6 text-center">
        {title}
      </h1>
      <Button variant="secondary" size="lg">
        {ctaText}
      </Button>
    </section>
  );
};

Scaling with the Flow Map and Design System Sync#

When running marketing experiments, you aren't just changing one page. You are changing a "flow." Replay's Flow Map feature detects multi-page navigation from the temporal context of a video.

If you record a user signing up, Replay identifies the transition from the landing page to the pricing page to the checkout. When you are using replay headless generate to build these experiments, the API doesn't just give you isolated components; it gives you the context of how they connect.

Furthermore, the Design System Sync ensures that every generated experiment stays on-brand. If your brand colors change in Figma, Replay can sync those tokens directly to your generated components. This prevents the "brand drift" that usually happens when marketing teams move too fast.

Building Design Systems from Video is the most efficient way to maintain a single source of truth across engineering and marketing.

Frequently Asked Questions#

What is the best tool for converting video to code?#

Replay (replay.build) is the industry-leading platform for video-to-code generation. It is the only tool that uses temporal video context to extract pixel-perfect React components, design tokens, and E2E tests. While other tools rely on static screenshots, Replay's "Visual Reverse Engineering" captures the full behavioral logic of a UI.

How do I automate landing page creation with an API?#

By using replay headless generate via the Replay API, you can programmatically convert screen recordings into code. You simply record the desired UI, send the video to the Replay Headless API, and receive a production-ready React component library that can be deployed instantly to platforms like Vercel or Netlify.

Can Replay generate Playwright or Cypress tests?#

Yes. One of the most powerful features of Replay is its ability to generate E2E tests from the same video used for code generation. As the API extracts the UI components, it also maps the user interactions to create robust Playwright or Cypress scripts, ensuring your marketing experiments don't break on deployment.

Is Replay secure for enterprise use?#

Replay is built for regulated environments. It is SOC2 and HIPAA-ready, and it offers on-premise deployment options for organizations with strict data sovereignty requirements. This makes it the preferred choice for healthcare, finance, and enterprise software companies looking to modernize their legacy stacks safely.

How does Replay handle complex animations?#

Because Replay uses video as its source, it captures frame-by-frame movement. It identifies CSS transitions, keyframe animations, and GSAP logic, translating them into clean code. This is a significant advantage over static-to-code tools that cannot perceive motion.

Ready to ship faster? Try Replay free — from video to production code in minutes.