The process of entering a physical store, completing a purchase, and leaving has been replaced by an unpredictable customer journey. For example, today an online customer may begin his journey by clicking on your ad, arriving at your website, but leaving without making a purchase. Within a week, he may receive a retargeting ad, view a TV ad, be referred by a friend, and finally return to your store to buy.
The chaotic nature of today’s buying process makes it more necessary than ever to predict and prompt customer actions. To convert visitors into customers, you need to optimize your overall marketing strategy and website design. That means you need to remove barriers to purchase, trigger specific actions, and create a pleasant and safe experience for customers. With conversion rate optimization you can achieve all this.
What Are Conversion Rate (CR) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion Rate
A website’s conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who perform the desired action on your website. This action converts them from visitors to leads (or customers). The desired action can be downloading an ebook, signing up for a demo, making a purchase, downloading an app, or anything else.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of conversions from a website or mobile app. CRO typically involves developing ideas for elements on your website or app that can be improved and then validating those hypotheses through A/B testing and multivariate testing.
Why is CRO Important?
- Get higher profits
- Increase your traffic
- Put the customers front-of-mind
Conversion rate optimization is important because it allows you to lower your customer acquisition costs by getting more value from the visitors and users you already have. By optimizing your conversion rate, you can increase revenue per visitor, acquire more customers and grow your business.
For example, if a landing page has a conversion rate of 5% and receives 1,000 visitors per month, then the page is generating 50 conversions per month. If the conversion rate can be improved to 20% by optimizing various elements on the page, the number of conversions generated increases by 300% to 200 conversions per month.
There is always room for improvement when it comes to increasing conversion rates, and the best companies are constantly working to improve their websites and apps to create a better experience for their users and increase conversion rates.
What Are CRO Tools?
If you want to convert interest into more sales, improve your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), increase your customer acquisition, or outsource your CRO strategy, you need a CRO tool. The type of tool you need depends on your business goals. CRO tools gather data about your website and its visitors to give you insight into how your website is being used, analyze it, and identify possible changes that could improve conversion rates.
Broadly speaking, CRO tools fall into three main categories:
- Web analytics CRO tools: Collect quantitative data about your website and its visitors, such as sessions, bounce rate, and more, to understand what is happening on your website.
- User behavior analytic tools: Track, monitor and optimize various aspects of user behavior on your software, app, or website.
- CRO testing tools: Determine what the best outcome is for your conversion rate when you make changes to your website.
What to Look for in a CRO Tool?
- GDPR Compliance
Protecting user data should always be the primary concern when making decisions based on user data. The CRO requires user data at every step, so it is extremely important for companies to choose CRO tools that are GDPR compliant. Opt for tools that use password encryption, multi-factor authentication, and regular hacking tests to protect all your data.
- Integrations
Before choosing a CRO tool, know which vendors will integrate with your existing technical infrastructure. Not only is this important for the functionality of the website/app, but a good conversion rate optimization tool will also make your other tools work more efficiently. A lack of integration between tools leads to data silos.
- Best-of-Breed vs Best of Suite
With a best-of-suite approach, you get a composable architecture that allows for continuous extensibility and flexibility, while best-of-breed solutions often have a static architecture that gives you a polished solution with high performance but less flexibility.
- Maturity Level of Your CRO Process
Recognizing the importance of CRO and using optimization resources effectively are two different things. However, it is relatively easy to determine how CRO -mature your organization is. You need to figure out where you are on the roadmap and what you need to do to take your CRO to the next level.
Top CRO Tools
Web Analytics
User Behavior Analytics
CRO Testing
Web Analytics
Google Analytics
- Platform Summary: Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool. It is a free tool, but you can upgrade it to Google Analytics 360 if you want to record more data. With this tool, you can view the health and performance of your website with detailed tracking and reporting dashboards.
- Key Features:
- Track conversion, retention, and bounce rates to re-strategize your marketing efforts by analyzing user activity and behavior.
- Get detailed and segregated demographic data to better understand your user base with visuals and reports.
- Create custom reports with the selected data you need for your purposes.
- Understand how users explore your site with flow visualization graphics.
- Track campaigns to understand what works on your website by adding UTM parameters to the URL.
- Key Integrations: Google Optimize, Google Tag Manager, HubSpot, Callrail, Shopify, Marketo, Facebook, WordPress, Hootsuite, Zendesk
- Pricing: Google Analytics has two pricing plans: free and 360. The cost of Google Analytics 360 starts at $12.5k per month and $150k per year.
- Clients: J.P Morgan, Salesforce, The North Face, Zara, Tesla, Fiverr, Bloomberg, Binance, Cloudflare, The Guardian
Adobe Analytics
Platform Summary: Adobe Analytics is a powerful tool that reports on web visitor data such as page views, time spent on a page, user tracking history, and more. Conversion rate optimization in Adobe Target lets you optimize experiences at every step of the customer journey based on KPIs. You get all the testing and targeting tools you need for cross-channel experimentation, from landing page to the mobile app. And when you combine Target with Adobe Analytics, you get insights into customer interactions across mobile, web, and other channels. So you can deliver better experiences to high-value customers – and improve your ROI.
Key Features:
- Capture data across multiple channels including web, app, email, web kiosk, campaigns, and client-server apps.
- Set up business goals and KPIs to track the success of your campaigns across all touchpoints.
- Use advanced segmentation to identify the key characteristics of each segment that drive your set metrics and dimensions.
- Integrate customer data from your CRM tool to add new dimensions to your segments.
- Supports ad hoc analysis, flow analysis, and cohort analysis.
Key Integrations: Segment, Salesforce, Marketo, Facebook, Power BI
Pricing: The cost can vary between $30k to $350k+ per year.
Clients: Dell, Deloitte, Citibank, Asos, Elsevier, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Asos, Marriott
Matomo
Platform Summary: Matomo, formerly known as Piwik, is a downloadable (GPL licensed ) web analytics software platform. It provides detailed reports about your website and its visitors, including the search engines and keywords they use, what pages they like, what files they have downloaded, and more.
Key Features:
- Take advantage of numerous benefits, such as tracking new data, restricting access to specific users, and modifying UI by writing plugins and adding available features.
- Gain insights into your business by understanding key metrics, such as the best time of day to schedule paid ads and post to social media.
- Unlimited website tracking, email reporting, data export and storage, e-commerce transactions per day, and more.
- Use various data anonymization techniques to gather useful information while protecting user privacy. The platform protects the sensitive or private information of organizations.
- Track goals and see if you are meeting your current business objectives.
Key Integrations: Magento, WordPress, Jira Cloud, and Jira Server
Pricing: Pricing can range from $0 to $16.9k based on your monthly site traffic and hosting options.
Clients: United Nations, Amnesty International, Ahrefs, NASA, Hubspot, Ahrefs, Flaticon, European Commission, NOYB, Kinsta
Amplitude
Platform Summary: Amplitude is another conversion funnel analyzer CRO tool. It is primarily designed for SaaS companies. Product, marketing and growth teams use it to gain user behavior insights from data and make decisions. Amplitude is preferred by managers compared to its competitors. It makes it easy to get insights from data.
Key Features:
- The entire field of mobile analytics is dedicated to the nuances of user behavior.
- Real-time user analytics, including customer engagement, funnel, revenue analysis, and flexible user segmentation.
- The Growth Discovery Engine helps predict behaviors that drive conversation or customer engagement and exponential user growth.
- Analyze the user behavior behind each data point. You can also make a comparison between the behavior of engaged and disengaged users.
- Track, visualize, and analyze engagement and behavioral data in real-time so you can optimize your entire customer journey.
Key Integrations: Snowflake, Braze, Amazon Web Services S3, Adjust, Adobe Analytics, Airbridge, Airship, Amazon, Appsflyer, Bigquery
Pricing: Pricing starts at $0 for 10M events, and $995 for 100M events. For 100M+ events, you will need to contact their sales times.
Clients: Intuit, StackShare, Ford, Atlassian, NBCUniversal Media, Square, SoFi, DataRobot, CloudApp, Calm
User Behavior Analytics
Mixpanel
Platform Summary: Mixpanel lets you analyze how users interact with your web-enabled product. It’s designed to make teams more efficient by allowing everyone to analyze user data in real-time to identify trends, understand user behavior, and make decisions about your product. Mixpanel’s Modeling Layer makes it easy to adapt existing data to your needs without burdening development teams.
Key Features:
- Compare time spans to better understand how trends change over time.
- Examine how users navigate to your product and where they leave your funnel so you can direct them to the optimal paths. Features like the ability to add an unlimited number of steps, filter by cohort, and exclude events make this report one of the most powerful on the market.
- View total conversions in Funnels to see how many times a user has converted in total within the specified time period. For example, if someone completes multiple purchases in a single visit, you now have the option to show all of those conversions instead of just one. The Time to Conversion chart also lets you see how long it takes users to complete a particular step in the funnel.
- You can add multiple correlation events, filter and drill down by properties, and add cohorts as filters or target events. Zoom in on actions that relate to your key business objectives.
- Examine how users move through your product, where they get stuck, and why, and find the most profitable paths to conversion.
Key Integrations: Adjust, Airship, Alooma, Appcues, Appsflyer, Batch, CallRail, Branch, Databox, Kameleoon
Pricing: Mixpanel’s pricing starts at $0 for 100k monthly tracked users. However, accounts can unlock the full power of Mixpanel for only $299 per year or $36 per month.
Clients: DocuSign, Uber, Ancestry, Yelp, BuzzFeed, Expedia, Ticketmaster, Deliveroo, GoDaddy, ZipRecruiter
Datadog
Platform Summary: Datadog gives you end-to-end visibility of user journeys for web and mobile apps. Datadog Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides insight into your app’s front-end performance from the perspective of real users. Each user journey is seamlessly correlated with synthetic tests, back-end metrics, traces, logs, and network performance data so you can quickly identify a poor user experience and troubleshoot issues with context from across the stack.
Key Features:
- Get comprehensive insight into modern applications. Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize application performance.
- Analyze and examine log data in context. Quickly search, filter, and analyze your logs to troubleshoot and comprehensively examine your data.
- Proactively monitor your user experience. Monitor critical user journeys captured with an easy-to-use web recorder and save technical resources with AI-driven, self-managing tests.
- Correlate front-end performance with business impact. Prioritize business and technical decisions based on usability metrics. Visualize load times, front-end errors, and resources for each user session. Decompose data using custom attributes.
- Visualize traffic flow in cloud-native environments. Understand performance using meaningful, human-readable tags. Use tags to filter traffic by source and destination or group by any criteria – from data centers to teams to individual containers.
Key Integrations: Kafka, Pusher, Apptrail, AuthO, Firefly, Altostra, Box, Snowflake, Apache, LambdaTest
Pricing: Pricing includes a Free, Pro, and Enterprise version. Pro pricing starts at $15 per host per month, while Enterprise pricing starts at $23 per host per month.
Clients: Samsung, Shell, Siemens, Whole Foods, Deloitte, SoFi, The Washington Post, Plaid, Sony, Lego System
Pendo
Platform Summary: Pendo is a product analysis app designed to help software companies develop products that are well received by customers. The app allows software publishers to incorporate a wide range of tools into their products that can lead to both a better product experience for users and new insights for the product team. As the company itself says, it promotes “product adoption, customer loyalty and team innovation.”
Key Features:
- Determine which features users are adopting and which they are ignoring, and how they are navigating your product portfolio.
- Monitor activity at both the account and individual user levels. Measure account activity to assess the state of your customers, understand who your super users are, identify historical trends, and track exactly what a user does over the course of a day.
- Compare usage between different segments. Whether they are large or small customers, test customers, or pay customers, the differences between segments is a great way to understand adoption patterns and retention risks. Pendo visualizes side-by-side comparisons of user behavior across segments, helping you identify hidden opportunities to improve the product experience.
- Understand user engagement and compare the health of your customers across all the apps they use. Pendo makes it easy to understand how users interact with different solutions, measure performance, and engagement between different apps, and drive user adoption across all your products.
- Identify revenue-generating activities, increase trial conversions, and develop features that customers are willing to pay for by analyzing the behavior of your most valuable customer groups and nurturing them at scale while creating plans to improve the state of less active customers.
Key Integrations: HubSpot, Algolia, Calendly, Figma, Salesforce, Zendesk, Segment, Intercom, Optimizely, Qualtrics
Pricing: Pendo’s yearly pricing can cost as high as $15K for the Pro plan and $50K for the Enterprise plan.
Clients: Verizon, Okta, Citrix, UserTesting, Henry Schein, Symantec, UserTesting, WebPT, IHS Markit, Verizon Connect
Microsoft Clarity
Platform Summary: Microsoft clarity provides usage statistics, session records and heat maps. It is a free analytics product that helps website managers improve their website by better understanding the behavior of website visitors. Clarity shows you which parts of your site are used the most and least, and provides an invaluable troubleshooting interface.
Key Features:
- Provides some unique insights, including unique reports such as “angry tips” and “excessive scrolling” that show users were confused or angry while navigating your site.
- Track users’ mouse movements, scrolling, and clicks on your web pages.
- Record where users click on your website to understand where your users navigate/interact the most.
- Set different filters to track sessions where users filled out a lead form, or create heatmaps to show which users might be frustrated by your page design.
- Clarity is GDPR compliant and is careful not to include sensitive data like numbers, images, and form content in records or heatmaps. This is ideal so you don’t accidentally store sensitive data like a user’s address or credit card information.
Key Integrations: WordPress, Google Analytics, Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly, ClickFunnels, WooCommerce, Unbounce, Joomla
Pricing: Clarity is free forever.
Clients: World Health Organization, Forbes, Steve Madden, Omega, Hewlett Packard, Cinemark, Acer, Pizza Hut, Adapt Worldwide, Pearly
CRO Testing
Google Optimize
Platform Summary: Google Optimize provides A/B testing, website testing, and personalization tools for smaller teams on a budget who do not have experience with CRO testing tools. Optimize lets you test variations of websites and see how they perform against a target you set. Then, the tool monitors the results of your experiment and tells you which variant is the best. Google Optimize can perform A/B testing, multivariate testing, and redirection testing. Thanks to the integration with Google Analytics, it is possible to segment audiences and deliver experiences to a specific group of users.
Key Features:
- A/B or A/B/n testing lets you test multiple versions of the same web page to find out which page works best for your users.
- With multivariate testing, you can test multiple elements on a page to see which combination achieves your goals.
- Run a redirect test or a split URL test where you can test different pages against each other. Redirect tests identify test variants by URL rather than by page element, which is especially useful if you want to test two very different landing pages or a complete page redesign.
- You can create and deploy your own variants in your own system. Use Optimize to view reports and determine the winner.
- Provide better-personalized experiences. Immediately launch the winning version of your site from an experiment or start a custom experience from scratch.
Key Integrations: Google Ads, Google Analytics
Pricing: Free
Clients: Fashion Nova, Candy, Grubhub, Theneo, Reonomy, Salesflare, Asana, Hive, Lulus, Instatext
Qualaroo
Platform Summary: Qualaroo is a user feedback and survey tool that helps businesses gain valuable insights and better understand their customers’ motivations. It uses surveys called nudges to gather deep user insights across multiple touchpoints. With more than 6 survey channels, Qualaroo is an advanced tool for user research and conversion optimization.
Key Features:
- Use the built-in professional templates to create any type of survey in minutes.
- Offers 12+ question types such as open, closed, dichotomous, Likert scale, NPS, emoji and more.
- Use Skip Logic and automatic language translations to make surveys more relevant.
- Capture and use feedback for product, website, and other optimization strategies.
- Helps you visually analyze feedback using the sentiment analysis and text analysis engine.
Key Integrations: HubSpot, Mailchimp, Marketo, Eloqua, Zapier, Salesforce, Tableau, Intercom, Slack, KISSmetrics
Pricing: Pricing starts at $80 per month, while it offers a 15-day free trial.
Clients: LinkedIn, eBay, Shopify, Forbes, Spotify, Hootsuite, Udemy, Udacity, Khan Academy, Glassdoor
Yieldify
Platform Summary: Yieldify is a fully managed end-to-end personalization platform that helps e-commerce businesses generate more revenue by engaging their customers with personalized experiences. Yieldify takes care of the CRO optimization journey for you, from ideation to execution.
Key Features:
- Make website changes quickly and without developers. With easy-to-integrate tag and no-code builds, you can get your first tests up and running in less than 14 days and launch new tests in as little as 48 hours.
- Sunburst charts give you a detailed and “multi-directional” view of your customer journeys, explaining how your users navigate your site, where they exit, and why. This way, you can identify what’s hindering your conversion rate and determine the next steps to improve it.
- Track, measure, and report changes in each of these behaviors to get a more nuanced view of your A/B and A/B/n tests that influence customer activity using purchase indicators.
- With Performance Predictor, you can see within two weeks how an A/B/n test variation is likely to impact CVR. If you see negative performance within two weeks of starting a test, you can stop a test early, reduce your loss variants, and optimize for better performance.
- At Yieldify, all customer and company data is processed in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. With password encryption, multi-factor authentication, and regular hacking tests, the information in your Yieldify dashboard is secure.
Key Integrations: Magento, Shopify, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Attentive, Yotpo, Afterpay, Klarna
Pricing: Their pricing model is custom and it is based on your company size and website traffic.
Clients: Adelaide Airport, Adidas, Asics, Coach, Harley-Davidson, Kerastase, Lee, Liquid I.V., L’Oreal, Macy’s
Optimizely
Platform Summary: Optimizely is a veteran website optimization software that enjoys great popularity and remains a favorite of many user testing brands. Optimizely is known for content, commerce and optimization with our Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Millions of experiences are served every day with our platform, helping businesses grow exponentially online.
Key Features:
- Design and run A/B tests without writing a single piece of code.
- Accelerate experiment execution and scaling without sacrificing performance with the Performance Edge feature, powered by the Experiment Delivery Network.
- Use the AI-powered product recommendation engine to recommend products and offers in emails and on the website.
- Automatically target audiences based on their interests and behaviors to optimize the user experience.
- Create, publish, and manage content across multiple channels with the integrated CMS platform.
Key Integrations: Shopify, Magento, Google Analytics, Shopify Plus, Magento, Criteo, Heap, Salesforce, Kalviyo
Pricing: Pricing starts at $36k per year. Depending on your needs and the features of the plan, your plan can easily reach $200k per year. Your website traffic is also a factor in pricing.
Clients: Dot, Atlassian, VISA, Discovery, AutoScout24, Electrolux, Gartner, IBT Industrial, Zoopla, SFI Health
All in all, you should realize that conversion rate optimization is not a quick fix. You will not see the results overnight. That’s not how conversion rate optimization should work either. It is a continuous process. So be prepared to increase your sales in the long run. If you are looking for an agency that can help you drive more leads, sales and revenue, contact us here.
