The 19 Best Conversion Rate Optimization Tools [2019 Edition]

conversion optimization tools

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of getting more people to take a desired action when they visit a website, whether that action is to make a purchase, subscribe to a list, or something else.

CRO involves research and a lot of moving parts, not to mention testing, testing, and more testing. It can be a lot of work, but if you want your business to thrive, conversion rate optimization is a must.

Fortunately, there are tons of conversion optimization tools and resources available to improve and simplify your CRO efforts.

In the ever-changing world of online technology, however, searching for the best conversion optimization tools for your business can be a daunting task in and of itself.

To narrow the hunt, we’ve created a list highlighting some of our go-to resources here at Conversion Fanatics.

These resources offer solutions to many of your most pressing CRO issues, including collecting data, assessing how visitors interact with your website, automating your marketing, managing your business’ workflow, and, of course, testing.

That said, let’s dive into the different types of conversion optimization tools your business needs, along with our top picks.

Types Of Conversion Optimization Tools

Here at Conversion Fanatics, we work with a range of conversion optimization tools, not just the ones we list below.  Some of our clients (SaaS, eCommerce, B2B, etc.) already have tools in place (so we use those). But when it comes to our favorites, the following are our go-to choices (after testing pretty much every tool there is).

Research And Analytics

conversion optimization tools - analytics and research

Image Source

Research and analytics tools are essential for successful conversation rate optimization. They allow you to gather valuable, data-driven insights about your website and its visitors, including where your traffic comes from and who your visitors are (their demographics).

These insights allow you to make informed decisions about what you should test and how you can make changes to your website to improve its performance and your conversions.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is, by far, the most popular tool for data collection. It provides just about every tidbit you might need to know about your website’s visitors via custom reports. Plus, it’s free to use.

GoSquared

GoSquared software reports metrics in real-time, which is unlike most other research tools. See which websites are sending visitors to your website and what actions your visitors are taking. You can get started with GoSquared for free.

Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is another excellent option if you want to learn more about visitor behavior on your website. Behavior analytics is one of Kissmetrics’ specialties. Kissmetrics also offers email campaign automation. Schedule a free demo to get started.

Heat Maps And Click Maps

conversion optimization tools - heat and click maps

Image Source

Heat and click maps are vastly underutilized CRO resources. These technologies allow you to discover how your visitors interact with your website, what they pay attention to, and what they ignore.

This information offers compelling insights into possible friction points. Plus, it comes in handy when you’re coming up with testing hypotheses.  If you don’t leverage heat and click maps in your marketing, you’re missing out on a truckload of valuable information about your website’s visitors.

Crazy Egg

One of the heat/click maps tools we like a lot is Crazy Egg, which is relatively inexpensive given the impact of the insights it offers you.  When it comes to CRO tools, Crazy Egg is one of our top choices. Pricing starts at $24/month after the free trial.

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange helps you better understand when and how your visitors become frustrated with your website and decide to leave.

It first tells you who is using your website and how they came to arrive. Then, it records your visitors’ movements and compiles that information into heat maps, showing you the actions your visitors take. Lucky Orange also offers form analytics and a customizable polling system. After the free trial, Lucky Orange is very affordable, starting at $10/month.

Hotjar

With Hotjar, you can implement exit polls, which let you gather information about what your visitors pay attention to most, what they click on, what they ignore, how far they scroll on a page, and more.

Hotjar also provides you with screen recordings of your visitors’ actual movements. These recordings offer essential insights about your visitors’ behavior as they navigate your website and what that behavior means in terms of your site’s design (i.e., what works and what doesn’t work). You can get started with Hotjar’s basic plan for free.

Testing Tools (Split, Multivariate, And More)

conversion optimization tools - testing tools

Image Source

Testing is a crucial component of conversion rate optimization. It enables you to make data-driven decisions (as opposed to “gut” feelings) about your site’s design and UX. This, in turn, helps improve your conversion rates.

There is no shortage of available solutions when it comes to A/B and multivariate testing tools. You have options such as Monetate, Adobe Test Target, Google Experiments, VWO, and more. But you’ll find the testing tools we like most below.

Convert

Convert.com is a flexible and user-friendly testing toolkit. It allows you to conduct a variety of experiments, including A/B, multivariate, split-URL, and multi-page, so you can get the most effective and accurate data about your website. It’s a less expensive solution that offers most of the same features and benefits as many of the more expensive programs on the market. You can get started with a free trial.

Optimizely

In as far as javascript-based tracking and testing platforms go, you’ll get excellent results with this tool.  Optimizely’s suite of features is robust, the user interface is fairly intuitive, and its customer support is fantastic.

Optimizely offers three pricing plans: Essentials, Business, and Enterprise. Contact the sales team for more detailed pricing information. Pound for pound and dollar for dollar, Optimizely provides results you can count on.

A/B Tasty

Besides A/B and multivariate testing options, A/B  Tasty comes with a wide variety of other features, including analytics, brainstorming tools, industry-specific templates, and a visual editor. It serves as a one-stop-shop for your conversion rate optimization needs. Fill out the form to get a custom quote.

Marketing Automation

conversion optimization tools - marketing automation

Image Source

Automating your marketing (or, at least certain parts, because you do still want to maintain a level of personalization) saves you time, energy, and resources.

There are lots of repetitive tasks when it comes to e-commerce marketing. But these tasks are important. They contribute to building brand awareness, generating new leads, and nurturing relationships.

When you automate these tasks, however, you adopt a more effective and streamlined approach that allows you to monitor your workflows and results, and generate more revenue and leads for your business.

Keap

To save time and energy with your marketing tasks, Keap, formerly known as Infusionsoft, offers services to assist with the following: lead-generation, campaign building, email marketing, CRM integration, follow-ups, billing, payments, and analytics. After the free trial, pricing begins at $39/month.

HubSpot

HubSpot Marketing Automation is an excellent resource for turning visitors into leads. It offers a variety of features, including content creation tools, analytics, a social media suite, lead flows, forms, and email marketing. HubSpot does involve a bit of a learning curve, but you can use the HubSpot Academy if you get stuck. Pricing starts at $50/month.

Attribution Tools

conversion optimization tools - attribution tools

Image Source

Attribution is the process of identifying and assigning value to the specific actions or touch-points that contribute to the occurrence of the desired action on your website (a conversion or KPI).

For example, say you’re running a paid traffic campaign, you’d probably like to know how well your campaign is performing so you can assess the ROI. You’d want to know things like your ad’s click-through rate and the number of conversions it leads to on your website.

Tracking attribution and performance can be an extremely painful task, however, especially if you’re doing it by hand. Tracking attribution manually is time-consuming, costly, and error-prone.

But the tools below can help ease that hardship by simplifying the process and presenting the information in a digestible format.

Improvely

The tool we leverage most for attribution purposes is Improvely. This tool allows us to track campaign performance down to EPC and average customer value. It can be a little more challenging to set up correctly. But it is well worth the effort when you’re able to quickly review your campaign’s performance in Improvely’s easy-to-read dashboard.

Altitude By Impact

Simply put, Altitude shows you what’s been working in your marketing to help your business grow and what hasn’t been working and why. Altitude uses machine learning attribution models to help optimize your marketing performance in a way that’s intelligent, actionable, and will have the most significant impact on your business’ growth and revenue. Click here to request a demo to learn more about Altitude’s pricing.

User-Experience Testing Tools

conversion optimization tools - user experience testing

Image Source

User-experience testing is an integral part of conversion rate optimization. It allows you to observe real people as they interact with your website and get direct feedback about their experiences.

You may think your website is as user-friendly as it gets. But after receiving input from actual users not affiliated with your business, you may learn a thing or two. This type of information is invaluable for your business’ success.

You can conduct user-experience tests either in-person or remotely. Performing these tests remotely, however, is generally quicker and less expensive. And that’s the route we’d recommend with the help of one of the tools below.

User Testing

Want to know how easy your website and checkout process are to use?  Try a resource like User Testing. Quickly and effectively find major friction points in your on-site experience by having a third-party test it out. Just 15-20 users through a service such as this can offer extremely valuable insights into what the user experience is like on your website. You can get started by requesting a trial.

Try My UI

With this tool, you first set up a test by creating a list of tasks you want users to complete on your website. Next, you select from a variety of demographic options to establish your target user. Then, you watch a video of real target users as they interact with your website, listening to their insights and where they have issues so you can apply that information to your site’s UX. Get started with a free trial.

Competitive Analysis Tools

conversion optimization tools - competitive analysis

Image Source

Sometimes looking at what your competitors are doing with their marketing is a good thing. Figuring out which ads they run and what landing pages they send their traffic to is great intel that gives you some much-needed leverage with your CRO efforts.

Below, you’ll find two top tools that can assist with this.

SpyFu

We use several tools to perform competitive analysis, depending on the goal of our client’s campaign. But our go-to tool is SpyFu. There are other tools, such as compete, iSpionage, Adbeat, and more. But for quick analysis on keyword rankings, ad performance, advertising spend, and advertising landing pages, SpyFu provides top-notch information. Pricing starts at $33/month.

SEM Rush

SEM Rush also helps you gleam several vital insights about your competitors. It offers information about your competitors’ PPC campaigns and their branded and non-branded traffic. Plus, it provides you with a list of all of the keywords your competitors’ sites are ranked for including each keyword’s position and search volume. Pricing starts at $99.95/month after the free trial.

Workflow Management Tools

conversion optimization tools - workflow management

Image Source

As your business and team grow, you’ll likely need a better, more effective way to manage all of the moving parts.

You may start out managing your CRO using spreadsheets or basic tools like Trello. But the more your CRO program evolves, the faster you’ll outgrow these workflow management tools. Soon, you’ll need to upgrade to something better suited to organize and monitor multiple complex systems, strategies, teams, projects, and experiments.

An effective CRO workflow management tool should provide you with an overview of your entire CRO program; allow you and your team to seamlessly collaborate and share ideas, research, and information; and provide you with the means to scale up.

Below, you’ll find two of our top picks for workflow management.

Slack

Slack is a company favorite. It’s a fantastic digital hub for more effective collaboration. Slack helps your team discuss projects, hire new employees, plan upcoming events, measure A/B tests, review contracts, and more. It also allows for integrated file-sharing, and you can conduct both voice and video calls directly from Slack. Pricing for Slack is very affordable, starting at $6.67/month.

Liftmap

This workflow management tool was designed specifically with optimizers in mind. It lets you manage your projects, collaborate with your team, and share your ideas with stakeholders. To learn about pricing, fill out the contact form here on Liftmap’s parent website.

Conclusion

There you have it – a shortlist of our most trusted conversion rate optimization tools after testing far too many to count. You should always do your research to find the solution that’s best for you. But we hope this list serves as a useful launching point.

If you need any assistance figuring out how these CRO tools work together or if you need help deploying a better conversion rate optimization plan of attack, call or email the team at Conversion Fanatics. We’re always happy to help.