A website is a home to many actions. Button clicks, form fills, purchases, and many more events collectively constitute engagement and conversions. Experience managers tend to look at these actions from both macro (site-wide) and micro (visitor level) lenses to understand their visitors and map their business’s overall conversion rate.
But there’s a problem.
Even though experience managers make sure to take every bit of information into account to analyze their business performance, many often don’t use the right conversion rate optimization tools, leaving room for flaws and glitches to breed. To avoid such hiccups, we’ve created a list of highly recommended CRO tools based on each conversion rate optimization stage to effectively enhance your website and business’s performance.
Before you add any CRO tool to your arsenal, evaluate them for the following carefully.
How to choose the right CRO tools?
GDPR compliance
Since you’re engaging with visitor data at each stage, it’s essential to ensure that your data collection tools must be GDPR compliant.
Integrations
To avoid data silos when using multiple data analytics tools, ensure that the tool has ‘integrations’ with other tools you use or open APIs to build custom integrations. This helps prevent data duplication, confusion, and related uncertainties.
Security
If you plan to install supporting CRO software on your website, ensure the tool doesn’t get breached, especially when running experiments. Your CRO tools must be safe and secure to use. Single sign-ons, multi-step logins, etc. help ensure security. Check your CRO tool under consideration for these critical features.
A multi-user friendly dashboard:
When selecting a CRO tool, make sure it offers an integrated dashboard where mapping your experiments and other activities is easy. A user-friendly dashboard also allows cross-team collaboration, which is a building block in CRO.
After evaluating the tools, let’s now look at some must-have CRO tools based on different conversion rate optimization stages.
List of some must-have CRO tools
The research stage
When it comes to conducting research, multiple CRO tools exist that help map both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data tools, such as web analytics, offer insights into what’s happening on your site. Qualitative tools such as heatmaps, scrollmaps, surveys, and the like give context to why it’s happening.
Mentioned below are some of the best CRO research tools you can use to collect necessary visitor data to form data-backed hypotheses for your CRO test campaigns.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics[1] is one of the best web analytics tools that tracks website traffic and user activities, such as session duration, pages per session, bounce rate, and more in real-time, across various site pages. It also offers additional information such as traffic source(s), visitor location and demographics, page performance, and conversions. You can use its premium version, Google Analytics 360, to unlock more in-depth insights.
Cost/month – Free
VWO Insights
VWO Insights is a popular and must-have user behavior research product for CRO professionals. It helps understand customer behavior through heatmaps, session recordings, on-page surveys, and more. The qualitative user behavioral data you get from VWO Insights helps form thorough hypotheses for your CRO roadmap.
Cost/month: Growth Plan:$169/month for 10,000 visitors; $247/month for 30,000 visitors; $310/month for 50,000 visitors. Custom pricing for Pro and Enterprise Plan.
Heap Analytics
Heap Analytics[2] is another qualitative data gathering tool that captures visitor interactions, including clicks, form submits, and transactions, and helps identify behaviors and marketing channels that convert the most. Heap also has a clean data analytics dashboard that’s quite handy and easy-to-use. When using the tool, you don’t have to create additional ‘events’ to track basic website interactions, as in Google Analytics.
Cost/month: Three comprehensive plans, including Free, Growth, and Enterprise. Only custom pricing is available.
Mixpanel
If Google Analytics sheds light on what’s exactly happening on your website, Mixpanel[3] helps you see who did what. With visitor behavior tracking, you also get the advantage of viewing specific insights into which set of website visitors have entered your sales funnel, which ones are bouncing off, and so on.
Mixpanel also offers an additional second data channel to compare numbers against Google, as it’s never a good idea to trust one tool for all analytical data blindly.
Cost/month: $0 for 1000 visitors; $174 for 5000 visitors; $304 for 10,000 visitors; $524 for 20,000 visitors. Custom pricing for 20,000+ visitors. – Read more
