Believe it or not, driving traffic to your website — albeit challenging — isn't enough to sustain your business. In an effort to truly leverage that investment in traffic, marketers must use conversion rate optimization, or CRO, to convince said traffic to complete a desired action.
In some cases, these optimization techniques might be as basic as changing the color of a CTA. In other cases, there's a lot more that can be improved.
The list below outlines a ton of helpful tools for marketers who are looking to optimize their conversion rates. To help you understand which tools are used for what, we’ve also broken this list into a few major categories: Lead capture tools, research tools, analytics tools, mouse tracking and heat maps, feedback tools, and experiment tools.
From high-level changes like landing page and email design and inspiration to in-depth insights on how your visitors navigate through your content, these tools will help you improve the performance of your site.
Ready? Let's get converting ...
Lead Capture Tools
These are the tools that you will use to capture more leads on your site, thus improving your CRO. While most conversion-focused content has a built-in form or CTA, these tools act as additional lead capture mechanisms to boost the number of leads that convert on your content.
1. HubSpot
Price: Free
Picture Google Analytics meets SumoMe meets a CRM. Sounds cool, right? It starts with an exit intent popup CTA, then sync with your website’s existing forms to learn about your site visitors and their path through your pages.
HubSpot's tools give you in-depth contact insights on prospects and current contacts in your database, and also pairs its contacts database with a dashboard that shows you on a high-level view of which marketing efforts are paying off and converting, and which ones aren’t.
2. HelloBar
Price: Free plan, or $29-$49/mo.
HelloBar is a lead capture tool that allows you to add a popup form to your website to grow your email list, promote your social pages, showcase a sale, or other lead generation strategies. The free version allows you to create one modal that'll be shown to every tenth visitor. However, premium plans offer more advanced call-to-action options.
3. Sumo
Price: Free plan, or $49/mo.
Sumo offers a suite of free tools to help you increase your site conversions. For lead capture, it offers a "Welcome Mat" popup CTA, a "Smart Bar" to increase email subscribers, a scroll-triggered box, and a "Contact Us" form.
Along with their Google Analytics research tools, the Sumo suite helps you gain on-page insights and increase your email list.
Research Tools
Before you create any content, you'll want to call upon these tools to draw inspiration and check out what other smart marketers have seen success with in the past.
4. BuzzSumo
Price: $99-$499/mo.
The best content is the content that gets shared and linked to the most. So what better way to gain preliminary insights than to compile all of the most shared content on your particular topic?
With BuzzSumo, all you have to do is enter the keyword or topic. Then, it'll pull together the most shared and linked to content on that topic. Time frames range from the last day, week, month, or year.
So if you’re trying to optimize the landing page for your new webinar on cat fashion, all you have to do is enter "cat fashion," and BuzzSumo will give the best articles, resources, videos, and more on the fascinating topic of cat couture.
You’ll then be able to dig in and explore some of the key elements that made these pages popular so that you can go back and incorporate them into your own content.
5. SimilarWeb
Price: Contact for pricing
Knowing where your website visitors came from can (and should) have a big impact on the type of content you create. With SimilarWeb, you can see where your traffic is coming from, which keywords are fueling your organic traffic, and what other sites are considered most similar to yours.
With this information, you’ll be able to optimize content for your biggest traffic sources, and dig in to see what competitor sites and doing to drive conversions.
6. Land-book
Price: Free
If you’re creating a landing page from scratch, getting started can be difficult. Luckily there’s Land-book: A free collection of the web’s best designed landing pages.
With Land-book, you can explore the ways that top companies are using elements like copy, positioning, layout, and design to drive conversions. Pick and choose your favorite elements from the Land-book database, and then incorporate them into your own landing page.
7. Really Good Emails
Price: Free
In today's marketing landscape, if you want to get your message across, you’d better know a thing or two about visual communication and design.
Don't know a thing or two about either? Enter: Really Good Emails.
Similar to Land-book (see above), Really Good Emails is a database of the web’s best designed emails from the world’s most innovative companies. Use this as a resource to see how you can design your email to get your message across in the best way possible, as fast as possible.
(Check out this post for even more resources where you can find great marketing examples.)
8. SubjectLine.com
Price: Free
When sending email, the subject line can either make or break your performance. Before you choose which ones to ship, check them out using this awesome resource.
SubjectLine.com has tested over three million subject lines and has a tool to evaluate your potential options. It gives a deliverability and marketing score, plus advice on improving.
9. Headline Analyzer
Price: Free
CoSchedule’s headline analyzer gives a score of 1–100 to gauge the effectiveness of titles. The score is calculated based on word usage, grammar, vocabulary, which type of headline it is, as well as character and word count.
The tool shows you what your headline looks like on Google and in an email subject line. This tool serves as a great litmus test to generally know how well your headline will perform.
Analytics Tools
These are the tools that you will use to measure and track your content's performance. You can use them to fully analyze the dips, jumps, and fluctuations in your conversion rate.
10. Kissmetrics
Price: Contact for pricing
Kissmetrics is a complex tool that integrates with your email service provider to make it easy for you to analyze your audience and email them in specific cohorts.
With Kissmetrics, you can learn the path that your customers have taken through your website, conduct A/B tests, build data sets (without SQL), and figure out the ROI from your campaigns.
11. Google Analytics
Price: Free for basic, contact sales for premium
Google Analytics is a free way to track your website visitors. You can see how long it takes visitors to bounce from your pages, if visitors complete goals from a certain path, and which sources are bringing people to your website.
What's great about Google Analytics is that is allows you to see which keywords people are searching to find your page, track which device people are searching for your website on, and uncover demographic data. However, there are no specific emails/contacts associated with your site visitors.
12. HubSpot Website Grader
Price: Free
Website Grader is a great way to get a quick snapshot of a website’s overall performance. It gives insights on performance factors (including speed, page size, and page requests), mobile responsiveness and appearance, SEO (page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and site map), and security.
From there, the tool devises a grade and provides suggestions on how to improve, which makes it easy to come up with some quick wins that'll help you boost conversions.
Mouse Tracking & Heat Mapping Tools
These are the tools that you will use to see how people are interacting with your content, including how they scroll and where they click.
13. Hotjar
Price: Free for Basic, $29/mo.
Once you’ve nailed the basics like landing pages, CTAs, popups, and content, you’re ready for some more advanced conversion rate optimization. Hotjar offers heat maps and screen recordings, which enable you to track how much of your page is being viewed, as well as how visitors are navigating your website.
Like the screenshot above, Hotjar also offers analytics, so you can see how well your pages are performing. This is helpful to see what is and isn't working, and what you can change to increase conversion.
14. Clicktale
Price: Contact for pricing
Clicktale is similar to Hotjar, as it also offers heat maps to help you determine the most valuable real estate on your pages, scroll depth (where is the "fold" on your website?), click tracking, and also link analysis.
Using these tools, you'll have the information you need to organize content, CTAs, and page design in a way that makes the most sense for engagement.
15. Clicky
Price: Free plan, or $9.99-$149/mo.
Clicky gives you real time analytics on the visitors on your website. It tells you where people are accessing your site from, how long they’ve stayed on each page, and how many visitors are actively online. The resource also offers heat maps and scroll tracking.
Clicky is an excellent one-stop shop for customer behavior. You'll have multiple formats at your disposal to leverage for optimizing the performance of your website — so you can convert as many leads as possible.
16. Crazy Egg
Price: $24 - $249/mo.
Crazy Egg offers a full suite of heat maps and click tracking, with the additional functionality of being able to segment clicks by source and evaluate link effectiveness.The basic package is fairly inexpensive and gives great insights on how effective each page of your website is.
17. Heatmap.me
Price: Free plan, or up to $100/mo.
Heatmap.me is a great free option for anyone looking to start exploring heat maps, responsive web design tests, and real-time page statistics. Heatmap.me can also track dynamic elements on your site in the heat map tool — think: slider bars, photo galleries, and other interactive sections.
When you use the tool, you'll be able to see real-time analytics. It gives you the data you really care about, such as CTR and page performance. They're easy to analyze for beginners, and provide the numbers you need to enhance success.
Feedback Tools
These are the tools that you will use to engage and receive feedback from your visitors. Feedback tools include surveys, polls, messaging, and user testing programs.
18. Intercom
Price: $87-$153/mo.
You can use chat tools to both acquire new customers and chat with existing customers.
As a CRO tool, you can use Intercom to communicate with website prospects to learn if they need additional help, find out how their experience is going, and learn how you can improve. It also allows you to track leads and use a shared inbox with your team.
19. Qualaroo
Price: $149-$499/mo.
Using chat windows doesn’t have to be limited to just being live. In fact, Qualaroo proves that. It offers popups to collect live feedback from website viewers.
With this information, you can tailor a site experience, target certain customers, and learn what issues people may be experiencing. This tool is extremely helpful at all stages of the funnel, and is especially utilized in the ecommerce space.
20. SurveyMonkey
Price: $25-$99/mo.
SurveyMonkey has a free option for those just starting out with survey research. You can use this tool to learn demographic information, discover which types of content your prospects and blog subscribers prefer, and get product feedback.
Survey your customers about their satisfaction. You'll get great insight, straight from the source, about what draws your audience to your company. From these results, you can work on improving conversion methods.
21. Five Second Test
Price: $50-$100/mo.
UsabilityHub has an awesome community-fueled tool called 5 Second Test that allows users to upload a product, app experience, or design and have the community test it before launch. For example, one of the tests you can run is a click test, which will give you a heat map of page performance.
You get responses about recall, general feedback, and UI thoughts. This is a great way to have opinions. Five Second Test also offer click tests, preference tests, question tests, and navflow tests for other website and UI questions. You can also design surveys with the tool.
Experiment Tools
These are the tools that you will use to manage, plan, and execute A/B and multivariate tests. Some of these tools will help you turn ideas into experiments, while others will help you create the variations and run the actual tests on your site.
22. Optimizely
Price: Contact for pricing
Testing is hard: It’s hard to come up with a good control group, find a large sample, and determine if your experiment is statistically significant. Luckily, Optimizely helps a lot with all of that ... and then some. With Optimizely, you conduct tests across all devices and platforms, then figure out if it is significant or not. The software offers A/B, multiple page, and multivariate tests.
Optimizely's tool gives you a full, robust report of test results, like shown above. You'll see how interactions, and best of all — sign up clicks. Your report will tell you how many leads each test variant earned, so you can choose the best.
23. Effective Experiments
Price: Contact for pricing
Effective Experiments is a concise way to track all of your experiments. If you have tons of Excel spreadsheets cross-referenced with Google Analytics data, you are probably going crazy trying to keep track of everything. This tool puts it all in one place and helps you determine statistical significance.
Now, you’re armed and ready to start improving conversion rates across your website and marketing efforts. These tools range from free and for beginners to robust and more advanced. Feel out which options seem right for you and soon you’ll be upgrading to the more complex tools when you’ve mastered the basics.
