43 Must-Have CRO Tools (Vetted for CRO Agencies)

Disha Sharma
By
July 15, 2020 ·
43 CRO Tools You Need for Your Optimization Agency in 2020

It doesn’t matter whether you serve one CRO client or fifty, your CRO process always includes the same steps. And each step requires a specific set of tools.

What are CRO tools?

CRO tools are used to obtain information on how visitors are using your site, find areas people struggle with, and test ideas to increase conversion rates, optimize the user experience and ultimately get more customers.

To help you streamline your Conversion Rate Optimization process, we’re sharing 43 top CRO tools the experts know and love, organized by the stages you can use them for.

Here are some of the most loved CRO testing tools:

  • Google Analytics
  • Heap Analytics
  • Hotjar
  • SurveyMonkey
  • Convert Experiences
  • Instapage
  • CXL’s AB+ Test Calculator
  • Iridion
  • Liftmap

However, before adding a CRO tool to your website optimization kit, evaluate it carefully for:

  • GDPR compliance: You’re using user data at every step of the CRO process, which means the tools you use to collect your data must be GDPR compliant.
  • Integrations: If your clients use 10+ analytics and user feedback tools, you can end up with 10 data silos. This makes ‘integrations’ a key feature to look for in your core A/B testing software. At Convert, we understand the frustrations of a CRO professional with processing data from so many sources, and so we support 100+ integrations. We also regularly add new integrations based on client requests.
  • Security: When you install CRO software on your clients’ website, it becomes your responsibility to ensure your clients’ website doesn’t get breached because of your experiments. So, your core conversion rate optimization tools must be safe for your clients’ websites.
  • A multi-client friendly dashboard: When servicing multiple clients maintain your sanity by ensuring the Conversion Rate Optimization Tools give you the ability to switch between your different client accounts.
  • Purpose-driven: As a techie, it is easy to get enamored with fancy software and tools, make sure any tool you purchase has a clearly defined business benefit.  

We vetted our list of tools with CRO agencies in mind.

Here goes…

When you optimize websites, conducting research is the first step you take. You need to gather both quantitative and qualitative data.

Quantitative data tools like web analytics solutions tell you what’s happening on your website, whereas qualitative tools like user behavior analysis and surveys explain and give context to why it’s happening.

Here are some tools you can use on your clients’ websites to gather the data you need to form data-backed hypotheses for your CRO experiments.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the #1 source for collecting website analytics data on your clients’ websites and is one of the most popular free CRO tools out there. You can use its premium version — Google Analytics 360, which unlocks deeper insights.

Your Google Analytics observations will always form a base for your hypothesis before you optimize websites.

2. Clicky Web Analytics

Clicky

Clicky is a popular alternative to Google Analytics, but you can also use it with Google Analytics. 

With Clicky, you can monitor and analyze website traffic in real time. It also comes with heatmaps, uptime monitoring, and SPAM traffic detection among other features that help you get more insights into your clients’ traffic trends and behavior.

3. Heap Analytics

Heap Analytics

Heap captures users’ interactions (such as clicks, form submits, transactions) with your client’s websites and helps you identify the behaviors and digital marketing channels that get the most users to convert.

Heap offers a clean data analytics dashboard and offers basic tracking of website interactions without the need to create “events”. Heap can be a great alternative to Google Analytics as you optimize websites and gather data.

4. Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics helps you understand the customer behavior of your clients across different devices and identify what’s working and not.

The user behavioral data you find with Kissmetrics can help you form a thorough hypothesis for your CRO experiments.

5. Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics homepage

This enterprise-level analytical tool turns your clients’ websites’ ‘vast streams of web data into insights that everyone can act on‘.

You also get marketing analytics data, channel conversion statistics, predictive analytics and more to power your CRO experiments.

6. Mixpanel

Mixpanel homepage

From understanding who your clients’ users are to what they’re doing on your website and the point where most of them abandon your funnel, Mixpanel can collect a lot of data for your CRO experiments.

Mixpanel helps you find the ‘hidden gems buried in your data automatically’ like the user segments who are underperforming, anomalies in your data trends or metrics, and more.

7. Woopra

Woopra

Woopra is an end-to-end customer journey analytics platform that lets you analyze the performance of your clients’ different KPIs over time, unlock insights from their users’ journey, and understand how the current users engage with the product or service.

From the most popular content to traffic reports and behavioral cohorts, Woopra offers a lot of data to form a hypothesis that will fuel you to optimize websites.

8. Matomo

Matomo

Matomo (formerly Piwik) is an open source web analytics software that also comes with heatmaps, sessions recordings, user flows, funnel and form analytics, multi-channel conversion attribution and more.

9. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a website optimization tool that shows you ‘what’ your clients’ users do on their websites. It offers snapshots and session recordings that tell how the website visitors navigate through the pages, where they click (or don’t), and where they feel stuck.

With heat mapping, scroll mapping, and individual (anonymized) click reports (confetti), Crazy Egg is a brilliant research tool to add to your CRO testing tools mix.

10. Hotjar

Hotjar

Hotjar is a popular Crazy Egg alternative. Just like Crazy Egg, HotJar helps you visualize the visitor behavior on your clients’ websites with click, move, and scroll heatmaps.

Besides these, HotJar’s features like visual feedback, polls, surveys, and user recruitment for testing make it a complete user behavior research suite for CRO professionals. Plus, it has a slick dashboard you can use to manage all your agency clients.

11. Clicktale

Clicktale

Clicktale is an enterprise-level user behavior solution that comes with features like: 

  • Mouse Move Heatmaps (that shows the ‘heat’ of every element over which the mouse moves or the ones that get clicked), 
  • Path Analytics (that identify the user paths on the website that lead to conversions or drop-offs and show what the highest converting user group engages with the most), 
  • Psychological Analytics (that decode the visitors’ digital body language), 
  • Form Analytics (that show you how to optimize the forms so they generate the most leads) and more for your clients’ website.

12. SessionCam

SessionCam

Packed with session recordings, heatmaps, conversion funnel and form analytics, SessionCam is a great user behavior analytics CRO tool.

It also offers intelligent insights like struggle detection to show you where your clients’ visitors struggle on their website, and anomaly and error detection.

13. Decibel

Decibel

With heatmaps, session recordings, behavior detection, form analytics and more, Decibel lets you collect ‘smart data‘ on your clients’ websites.

Decibel helps you analyze your clients’ website or app experience to understand what you can test in your CRO experiments and improve website conversion.

14. Qualaroo

Qualaroo

This qualitative insights tool helps you understand the ‘why’ behind your clients’ users’ decisions. It lets you survey your clients’ visitors based on specific actions, behavior patterns, geolocation, data streamed and more.

Powered by IBM Watson, Qualaroo’s sentiment analysis helps you analyze your survey responses to understand the sentiments of your users about key areas like pricing. This tool can give you a goldmine of information for running your CRO experiments.

15. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey offers a significant way to collect feedback on your clients’ websites. You can use the insights you learn from your surveys to plan tests that can boost your clients’ conversions or brand loyalty or both.

16. Survey Gizmo

Survey Gizmo

This enterprise-level survey and data insights software ‘empowers businesses to make smarter decisions.’ It lets you connect your clients’ visitors’ feedback and analyze the responses to find actionable insights to test in your CRO experiments.

17. UserTesting

UserTesting

UserTesting lets you optimize websites by testing them with either a user demographics just like your clients’ target audience or by letting you engage their real users for testing things like the website’s usability, customer experience, and more.

The data you collect here can help you form a good hypothesis for your CRO experiments involving design changes.

18. UsabilityHub

UsabilityHub

UsabilityHub lets you take the ‘guesswork out of design decisions by validating them with real users.

UsabilityHub comes packed with methodologies like first-click tests, five-second tests, preference tests, and design surveys to help you uncover useful insights from actual users of your clients’ websites.

19. Usabilla

Usabilla

Usabilla lets you collect qualitative and quantitative insights from your users to build high-converting websites. The data you gather here also helps you plan data-backed design tests for your clients’ websites.

20. Copytesting

Copytesting

Copytesting enables you to take the guesswork out of copy for websites, ads, product pages, headlines, and emails by validating copy using actual people who are in your target demographics.

To improve how you optimize websites, Copytesting also lets you test tone of voice, brand positioning, value proposition and prototypes.

Once you’ve analyzed all your data, it’s time to write your hypothesis. Making data-backed hypotheses is a key step for running winning CRO experiments that help you optimize websites.

Here are some tools to help you write a clear hypothesis:

21. Craig Sullivan’s hypothesis framework

CRO influencer Craig Sullivan shares a handy kit with two options for writing hypotheses for CRO experiments.

22. Conversion.com’s hypothesis framework

This hypothesis generator is an easy tool for writing detailed, data-backed hypotheses. You also get detailed explanations for what the different hypothesis fields mean.

23. Corvus CRO Hypothesis Builder

This hypothesis generator has a three-pronged approach. It helps build solid hypotheses that include these elements:

  • Comprehension – What are potential areas for improvement?
  • Response – What changes can be made?
  • Outcome – What’s the desired result and how can it be measured?

24. Experiment Hypothesis Generator

This hypothesis creator that doubles up as a ‘bullshit detector’ shows you if you’re starting off to a really weak or flawed hypothesis.

Once you’ve written a series of hypotheses to create your experiments, you must prioritize them.

This is an easy tool to set priorities for your experiments: Conversion XL’s PXL framework

This PXL framework helps you spot the ‘good’ test ideas from your lot that have the potential for the highest impact. You can learn more about the framework here.

Once you have your hypothesis ready, it’s time to design, develop, and test the new web pages you’d like to run against the original version. Either you can hire dedicated resources to build your treatment OR you can go for turnkey CRO solutions like Convert. 

Alternatively, you can try using landing page builders and then take care of the testing, reporting, and analysis steps separately.

25. Convert Experiences

Convert

Convert Experiences is one of the most comprehensive testing solutions out there. With it, you can design A/A, A/B, and multivariate conversion experiments across your website. From testing minor changes like the CTA button copy to experimenting with an alternate sales funnel, Convert offers extensive experimenting possibilities.

The best thing about Convert is its commitment to data protection and its ability to give CRO agencies the freedom to put clients in separate buckets (projects) with the advantage of testing on unlimited domains and subdomains (given the right plan).

See why Convert is the #1 choice of most CRO agencies.

Free Trials

The best way to check out a tool is by exploring it. Get full access to Convert for 15-days for free. A/B test, check out all our integrations and see why so many optimizers chose Convert Experiences as an Optimizely alternative.

Looking to compare the top A/B testing tools in the market? We have a complete breakdown of features for key players like Optimizely, VWO, AB Tasty and more, in an easy to navigate tool. Find out here.

26. Lander

Lander homepage

Lander comes with 100+ ready-to-use landing page templates with a user-friendly page editor.

27. Instapage

Instapage homepage

With 200+ landing page templates covering SaaS, consulting, eCommerce, nonprofits, apps and more, Instapage is a handy page builder for creating new designs to optimize websites.

Because forms are an important part of most of the pages, you’ll use in your CRO experiments, you can use form-focused solutions like Wufoo and Formstack to create custom forms to add to your pages.

With the treatment ready, you’re now ready to run your CRO experiments to optimize websites.

But getting the sample size and test duration right are two critical factors to run meaningful CRO experiments.

Here are some tools to help you with this.

28. Convert’s AB Test Duration Calculator

This handy AB test duration calculator shows you the number of days you need to run your AB (or multivariate) test for along with the number of visitors you need to reach the defined statistical significance.

29. Convert’s Sample Size Calculator

This is an extended functionality of the duration calculator introduced above. Using it you can also find out the sample size of the audience segment that has to be exposed to your tests for statistical significance.

30. Sample Size Calculator

This A/B test sample size calculator shows you many subjects you need to run your A/B tests.

31. Split Test Duration Calculator

This split test duration calculator shows you how long your split tests must run based on your current conversion rate, the number of variants, statistical confidence level, and traffic.

32. Confidence Intervals Calculator

Okay, not a tool — but a very reliable formula for calculating the confidence interval for your conversion experiments.

33. Sample Size Calculator

Another sample size calculator that takes into account your margin of error, confidence level, and traffic to give you the ideal sample size for your CRO tests. 

Once your CRO experiments get over and you’ve pulled the results, it’s time to understand them and find out if the variations you ran outdid the original version(s) significantly.

With a CRO solution like Convert, you get in-built reporting to understand the performance of your experiments.

But here are some more tools to help you make sense of your results.

34. Bayesian A/B Test Calculator

This handy A/B test calculator helps you calculate how likely your test variation is to beat the control (or the original version). This A/B test calculator uses the Bayesian test approach that works toward eliminating ‘the risk of implementing non-significant test variations’.

35. A/B Testing Significance Calculator

This simple calculator shows you if your A/B (or multi-variant) test has resulted in a statistically significant result.

36. Chi-Squared Test

This popular statistical hypothesis test shows you how well your test results have turned up compared to your expected results.

37. 2 Sample T-Test

This two-sample hypothesis test shows you if there’s a significant difference between two datasets generated from your CRO tests — for example, two datasets of the values of transactions from your two-page variants. Here’s an excellent resource that shows the test in action.

38. CXL’s A/B Test Calculator

This tool is actually a set of tools with a sample size calculator, test duration calculator, and a post-test analyzer that helps you understand the results of your tests using the Bayesian, Z Test, and Chi-Squared techniques.

Suggested Read from Convert:

At this stage, you go back to the drawing board with your test results. Tools like a testing roadmap are useful here.

Also, check out this valuable article on how you should approach learning from your CRO experiments.

Besides the above, you might also need a CRO workflow management tool as part of your CRO software mix.

39. Convert Compass

This tool is a best-in-class hypothesis management and learning solution to the Convert suite.

With Compass, you can identify test-worthy opportunities on your site (addressing issues that really hamper conversions), prioritize ideas for proper allocation of CRO resources, and learn iteratively from the tests run for consistent improvements in CRO results.

Free Trials

The best way to check out a tool is by exploring it. Get full access to Convert for 15-days for free. A/B test, check out all our integrations and see why so many optimizers chose Convert Experiences as an Optimizely alternative.

40. Effective Experiments

Effective Experiments

This ‘all in one project management & workflow platform’ offers end-to-end support for running CRO programs for all your clients. Effective Experiments eliminates the need for you to use a suite of apps like spreadsheets, general project management software, report generators and more when working on your client projects.

41. MetaDimensions

MetaDimensions

MetaDimensions lets you ‘structure your testing program’ and collaborate over your CRO projects and share all the test ideas and learnings. It lets you bring together all your CRO data from different sources and your routine CRO tasks and streamlines your CRO process.

42. Iridion

Iridion

This ‘all-in-one solution for conversion optimization’ is your CRO tool that covers everything right from generating test ideas and hypotheses to prioritizing tests and monitoring/documenting your results.

43. Liftmap

Liftmap homepage

Here’s a project management tool built only for CRO projects. It’s ‘made for Optimizers, by Optimizers.’ This tool wants to help you handle everything right from organizing your CRO experiments to prioritizing them.

Wrapping It Up…

So there you have ’em… 43 top CRO tools to plan and run better CRO experiments and generate more revenue.

Originally published July 15, 2020 - Updated January 17, 2024

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Authors
Disha Sharma
Disha Sharma

Content crafter at Convert. Passionate about CRO and marketing.

Editors
Carmen Apostu
Carmen Apostu

In her role as Head of Content at Convert, Carmen is dedicated to delivering top-notch content that people can’t help but read through. Connect with Carmen on LinkedIn for any inquiries or requests.

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