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You have built a great-looking website. Now what? Clearly, you want to make as many sales as possible.
What can you do to turn more visitors into customers? There are many factors that affect website conversion and you need to dial in many moving parts.
Thankfully, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can implement various conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies to improve your website’s effectiveness. Even better, there are many tools available to help you with every aspect of CRO.
Discover what CRO tools can do for you. Learn about the best conversion rate optimization software available and how these tools stack up in terms of features and price points.
The conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors that have completed a specific action out of the total number of visitors. The conversion event often refers to a sale, but it can be submitting a form, downloading an app, booking an appointment, asking for a quote or requesting a callback.
CRO tools are designed to help implement CRO strategies and increase conversion rates through data analytics, content optimization, lead capture, heat mapping, customer feedback, split testing and more.
There are many website conversion optimization tools available at various price points with different features and purposes, from optimizing landing page design to providing in-depth insights on how visitors navigate your website and interact with your content. Here are some top CRO tools:
Analyzing data from your website, sales funnel and landing pages can help you pinpoint issues that are impacting your conversion rates. These analytics tools enable you to track website usage and performance so you can gain insights to increase your conversion rates.
One of the most popular analytics tools, Google Analytics allows you to track the activities of your visitors, such as the devices that they use, the time it takes for them to bounce from your pages, how they engage with your content and whether they complete specific user paths.
You also can see the traffic sources that bring people to your site, the keywords that visitors use on search engines to find it and demographic data about your visitors. However, it doesn’t associate the emails or contact information of the visitors with their subsequent interactions with your brand.
Price: The basic version is free, which is sufficient for most small and midsize businesses. Analytics 360 begins at $150,000 a year and the cost increases after a site exceeds one billion monthly hits.
HubSpot Website Grader is a free CRO tool is easy to use and provides a snapshot of your website’s overall performance with a couple of clicks. Simply enter your website and email address to get insights on performance factors (e.g., page speed and page requests), mobile responsiveness, SEO optimization (e.g., page title, meta descriptions and site map) and website security.
You also will get recommendations on how to improve your site’s conversion rates. This is a great tool if you’re just starting out because it helps you identify some low-hanging fruit and get some quick wins with minimal cost.
Price: Free.
Most first-time visitors don’t buy right away, so you should capture their information to continue building relationships and drive sales over time. These lead capture tools will help you turn more visitors into email subscribers so you can use email marketing to get them back to your website.
With the HelloBar tool, you can add a persistent callout bar at the top of your website to capture email addresses, announce a sale, promote your social pages and more. It doesn’t interrupt the website experience and is always visible. However, it could get overlooked because it’s not as attention-grabbing as a pop-up or scroll box.
The “Free Forever” starter plan offers limited features and up to 5,000 views per month. The paid plans, which start at $29 per month, include more views, design features, targeting functions, A/B testing, advanced integrations and customer support.
Price: Free version available. Paid plans start at $29 a month.
Sumo, an easy-to-use suite of tools, is designed to help you capture more email subscribers on your website with various widgets, such as Welcome Mat, Smart Bar, scroll-triggered box and contact form. Sumo offers plugins for WordPress and Shopify. You also can use the Google Tag Manager plugin to integrate with Google Analytics for on-page insights.
You can access most basic features such as email opt-in forms, customizable design, social sharing, welcome emails, email integration and more with the free version. The Pro plan, which costs $39 a month, offers additional functionalities such as advanced visitor targeting, A/B testing and advanced analytics.
Price: Free version is available. The Pro plan is $39 a month.
No matter how you’re driving traffic to your website, your landing pages play an important role in getting your visitors to take the next step, such as joining your email list or placing an order. These tools help you build landing pages quickly while incorporating the latest CRO best practices to increase conversion rates.
LeadPages is one of the most popular landing page tools designed to help small businesses connect with their audiences, collect leads and close sales. It comes with robust and easy-to-use features, such as a drag-and-drop visual editor, lead management support and predesigned templates. You also can access a user-friendly analytics dashboard and real-time conversion tips.
All the plans allow you to create landing pages, pop-ups and alert bars. You also get free hosting, mobile-responsive templates and 40+ standard integrations. The Pro plan gives you unlimited A/B testing and the Advanced plan includes additional opt-in text campaigns.
Price: Standard plan costs $25 a month, the Pro plan costs $48 a month and the Advanced plan is $199 a month.
Unbounce, a landing-page builder, integrates seamlessly with Google Ads and other popular digital advertising networks. It supports dynamic content that’s automatically adjusted based on the keywords used in searches. This helps improve the landing page experience, which will increase the Quality Score of your Google Ads to lower cost.
This software comes with many predesigned templates and integrates with many customer relationships management (CRM), content management system (CMS) and email marketing platforms. It also offers industry-specific solutions for ecommerce, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and agencies.
Price: The basic plan costs $80 a month and the more advanced plans cost $120, $200 and $300 a month.
According to Google, visitors are 106% more likely to leave a site when page load time goes from 1 second to 6 seconds. A slow load speed could cost you a lot of website visitors, especially those using mobile devices. These CRO testing tools will show you how your site stacks up.
PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content on a webpage and reports on its performance on both mobile and desktop devices. It also provides suggestions on how the page may be improved. After you have entered a uniform resource locator (URL) into the tool, you’ll get a performance score and optimization tips for quick wins. For example, by using browser caching, optimizing images or minifying assets.
Price: Free.
The GTMetrix CRO tool shows data about your site speed and goes into those metrics in detail. It allows you to compare data of up to five websites and test your site speed from different locations to see the exact user experience from different countries. You can get your page performance in a summarized report, schedule testing to monitor performance and set up an alert so you can be notified when the site underperforms.
Price: The basic plan is free and paid plans start from $14.95 a month.
These mouse tracking and heat mapping applications show you how visitors interact with your website content, such as how they scroll and what they click. You can find out what’s attracting their attention and if you’re putting the most important information in the right place.
Hotjar offers heat maps and screen recordings to track how your pages are viewed and how visitors are navigating your website. You can identify the most-clicked sections on your pages, where visitors leave a page and what users interact with most.
This tool integrates with many popular website platforms, including WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, Weebly and more to make implementation a breeze. It also offers incoming feedback and survey features to help you gather feedback directly from visitors so you can reduce the cost and complexity of managing multiple systems.
Price: The basic version is free and paid plans start from $39 a month.
CRO tool Crazy Egg helps you understand the customer journey with snapshots, heat maps, scroll maps and recordings. You can analyze scrolling patterns and conduct A/B testing to understand your visitors’ behaviors. You also can segment clicks by traffic source to evaluate link effectiveness.
The results give you an extra layer of insights into your Google Analytics data. You can drill down to see how visitors from various traffic sources (e.g., emails vs. ad campaigns) interact with your content and find out if your calls to action (CTAs) are placed optimally to maximize conversion.
Price: The Basic plan is $24 a month, the Standard plan costs $49 a month, the Plus plan is $99 a month and the Pro plan is $249 a month.
Sometimes the best way to find out what your visitors want is to simply ask them! These feedback tools help you collect input from website users through surveys, polls, messaging and more.
Intercom, a live-chat tool, allows you to interact with visitors in real-time as they’re on your website. You can glean insights on what they’re looking for, what they have trouble finding, how they prefer to interact with your content and what you can do to improve the user experience.
You can also answer questions and address objections in real-time during critical points in the customer journey to progress visitors down the sales funnel and increase your conversion rate.
Price: The Basic plan is $39 a month, the Grow plan is $99 a month, the Accelerate plan costs $499 a month and the Scale plan is $999 a month.
Qualaroo allows you to display specific surveys as users interact with your website content. You can derive actionable insights from the answers based on where the visitors are on your site, their browsing history, the issues they’re experiencing and other contextual information.
You can use popups to collect real-time feedback at every stage of the sales funnel and leverage the advanced targeting function to ask the right users the right questions at the right time. The AI-driven sentiment analysis feature categorizes the results and the “word cloud” feature extracts key ideas from free-form answers.
Price: The free plan supports up to 25 responses a month. The paid plans start at 20 cents a response per month.
You have developed insights from the many tracking, feedback and analytics tools. Now what? You have probably come up with a few hypotheses and it’s time to find out what works most effectively for your website. Use these CRO testing tools to manage, plan and execute A/B or multivariate tests.
This tool integrates seamlessly with Google Ads and Google Analytics to help you convert ad clicks into customers by testing and customizing your landing pages. If you do a lot of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Google Optimize can help you quickly turn insights into action to increase your conversion rates.
The free version works best if you don’t need to test many complex ideas. However, you can only set up five experiments at a time. The paid version, Google Optimize 360, is more robust but is reported to cost $150,000 a year.
Price: The basic version is free. Contact sales for pricing on Optimize 360.
Optimizely helps you run unlimited A/B, multipage and multivariate tests across all devices and platforms. The software allows marketing teams to quickly experiment with different copy and imagery variations without writing code. You’ll also get full reports of the test results to see all the interactions and clicks, as well as world-class customer support.
The many robust functionalities also come with an enterprise-level price tag (reportedly starting from $50,000 a year.) Due to the many complex functions, some users find it challenging to configure the software and integrate it with other digital marketing and analytics tools.
Price: Contact sales for pricing plans, which vary based on functionalities and the number of impressions.
With so many CRO tools available, you need to choose wisely so you can analyze the right metrics and make improvements that’ll increase your conversion rates cost-effectively.
Keep in mind that CRO is an ongoing process and you need to be constantly improving your website. As such, you should periodically re-evaluate your CRO tools to make sure they still are helping you keep up with the fast-changing market trends and consumer behaviors.
Ling Wong has more than 15 years of experience in the realm of online marketing. She writes about business-to-business marketing, customer experience, search engine optimization, the latest in marketing technology and online marketing for small businesses.
