Everybody wants to optimize their website. It doesn’t matter if your company is big, small or even if you’re just going solo. In 2023, people expect that when they visit a website, it will be a smooth experience, and they can find what they are looking for without getting tangled in a web of confusing menus or slow pages.


To tackle this increasingly important issue, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) has become a prevalent role over the past few years. Having someone dedicated to learning what works on your website and continuously optimizing to improve your customer experience is an invaluable asset to have. Software companies have caught on to this trend and can see how important it is. As seen below, a quick search on Google Trends even shows that the number of searches for conversion rate optimization has increased by roughly 75% from 2015.

However, the dilemma for CRO specialists now is - there are so many tools to choose from, which is the best fit for you and your needs? In this blog post, we’ve made your job a little easier by compiling a list of 8 of the best CRO tools on the market in 2023.

What are CRO tools, and why are they important?

CRO tools refer to any tool or platform that can assist your team in optimising your users’ on-site experience. This can be either directly (for example tools that allow you to A/B test different variations of a website) or indirectly, such as that handy excel spreadsheet you made to keep track of all your experiments and their impact on key metrics.


They are important because they provide you with the essential information you need to understand what is happening on your site. Both while conducting experiments and testing changes to improve the user experience. Without any CRO tools, you would not be able to know who is using your website, what content they view or even where things are going wrong.


Getting the right tools for your needs is essential. There are a lot of great options out there, but purchasing the wrong tools for CRO can often be more of a hindrance than a help. What’s even more important is making sure that the tools fit your people and CRO process within your organization. If you have a whole team of digital experts willing to help you, it’s a pretty good bet you’re going to need a different solution than that one-person marketing team from a small business.


We know there’s no shortage of great CRO tools to help you.  So to help you figure out what tools will best fit your needs, we’ve broken our list down into 3 categories:

• Analytics tools
• Insights tools
• Experimentation tools

‍

Best CRO Analytics Tools

If you can’t measure it, how will you know what works? Analytics tools are an absolute must-have for any website. They help you to better understand important questions like how many people visit your site, what content they view, what actions they take and where you are getting these visitors from.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a life-saver for anyone with a website, but a must-have for anyone working in CRO. According to W3Techs, 55% of all websites have Google Analytics installed.


Being a free tool, it certainly is packed full of features. You can measure almost any interaction with your website, as well as vital information about your visitors. You can monitor metrics such as page views, unique visitors, button clicks, and time spent on page (just to name a few). On the audience insights side, you can see what channels your visitors are coming from, where they are located, what device they are using and much more. If there’s a metric you want to measure on your website, you can almost always do it with Google analytics.


Installation is quick and easy - you just need to install a small javascript snippet on your website in the HTML element. Some modern CMS’ (such as Wix) will also have built in-features to set up Google analytics for you. (Pro tip: Google Tag Manager can also be used to install Google analytics; this way you just have to install the one snippet to your website, which can be connected to all google and third-party tags).


Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics is an excellent analytics solution that enables you to track your full user journey across multiple channels. This can include your website traffic, but also email marketing, apps and much more.


It can help you answer all those tough questions like where are users coming from, and why do they come to your site? And once they do get on your site, what would be the best product or page to show them?


Some of the features include Ad hoc analysis, which lets you build custom analysis projects by dragging and dropping various data tables and v into a project. Flow analysis, which v where visitors left your site or which pages they continued to. And advanced segmentation; enables you to discover the most statistically significant differences between your segments with an automated analysis of every metric and dimension.

Best CRO Insights Tools

We’ve covered the essentials with analytics tools. So now we know all about how to measure what’s happening on your website. But even if you can measure what’s happening - how do you understand why that happens? In this section, we will be covering insights tools, which provide you with the insights you need to better understand your users and why making changes to your website can have vastly different effects.

expoze.io

expoze.io is an attention prediction platform that helps you to predict what will get noticed. Using a neural network that has been trained on thousands of images and videos, you can predict with 94% accuracy (relative to traditional eye-tracking) where people’s attention will go in any visual setting. The tool works perfectly on websites, which you can analyse using heatmaps that are generated by expoze.io to identify which areas of your website are receiving the most attention. With the use of Areas of Interest (AOIs), you can also quantify exactly how much attention goes to each element of your page.

A great example of this is shown below in the screenshot of the Amazon home page. Using expoze.io, we created a heatmap of the home page and analysed two of the main product category sections using AOIs. You can see that the ‘Gaming Accessories’ section gets significantly more attention (15.3%) than the ‘Electronics’ Section (6.1%). We haven’t discussed the matter with Amazon ourselves, but we can imagine that if they want more traffic to the Electronics page, they may want to create an alternative version of their home page.

UsabilityHub

UsabilityHub is a remote user research platform that allows you to get a better understanding of why your users make certain decisions on your website. You can do this in multiple ways, one of which is First Click Tests. This feature helps you to test the effectiveness of your content hierarchy by measuring how people complete tasks using your designs. A great example of this can be seen below in a first click test that asks users where they would click to accomplish a certain task:

Another great feature of UsabilityHub is Prototype tests, which will gather user feedback directly from within a Figma prototype. So you don’t need to go live or even develop your solution before you can start gathering feedback. And of course, the five-second tests, which helps to optimise the clarity of your design by measuring your users’ first impressions and recall after seeing a page for 5 seconds.


UsabilityHub also offers preference tests and design surveys. All of which can be used to better understand your users and make informed decisions.

UserTesting

UserTesting enables you to get real first-hand feedback directly from real participants. It essentially will allow you to create a test plan that requires users to perform specific tasks, which is then shared with a segmented target audience of your choice. The platform has a large network of test participants from different countries, demographics and a variety of B2B and B2C users as well.


Once you have selected your target audience, your testing begins. Your product or prototype is shared with the user, and they record themselves navigating through the interface and trying to complete the assigned task. Participants are instructed to ‘think out loud’ so that you can know what’s going through their minds as they complete the task.


Once the test is complete you can of course watch the recording, but the platform also offers visualisations in various different kinds of charts, as well as transcripts and customised metrics to get the qualitative and quantitative insights you need. Once your testing is complete, you can export your results to one of your preferred tools like Slack, Jira or Trello through their native integration.

Best CRO Experimentation Tools

Now you have all these handy insights from your users and data about how they interact with your site. How can you act upon that?


Well, fortunately now with CRO experimenting tools you can create your hypothesis of what kind of content will work best, and A/B test them on your live website to see which performs better.

VWO Testing

VWO Testing is a web testing platform that allows you to create different variations of your website with minimal development assistance. They offer a point-and-click visual editor which allows you to edit any element on your website (text, images, shapes etc.) all without writing a single line of code. For copywriting, VWO testing even offers an AI copy generator which will suggest copy alternatives for you within the editor.


The tests are not just limited to A/B tests. It’s also possible to create multivariate tests and split URL tests if you wish to use two different URLs of the same landing page. The segmentation feature will also enable users to run tests based on visitor behaviour. For example, if somebody is looking at a page for more than a certain amount of time, or if they clicked on a certain element.


On top of all the great testing functionality, the reporting offered by VWO testing is second-to-none. You can segment your reports based on user characteristics, such as new vs returning users, device type and query parameter. If you add on the VWO insights module, you can also understand how visitors interact with your page using heatmaps and session recordings. All of which can be kept in a neat repository of learnings with VWO Plan.


Instapage

The Instapage platform provides everything you need to build personalised landing pages that meet each of your segments’ needs. By creating several pre-designed versions of your landing page that are tailored to each of your target segments, Instapage will enable you to match these landing pages to your target audience dynamically by pairing them with certain ads and visitor-level data such as keywords, firmographics and demographics. Additionally, it’s also possible to customise landing page experiences based on UTM parameters, which can come in handy for organic campaigns and social posts.


The platform also comes backed with optimization tools such as A/B testing, heatmaps, analytics and real-time reports.


Note: Google Optimize would have been on this list, but Google announced that it will sunset Optimize and Optimize 360 later this year on September 30, 2023. Read our blog 'Top 6 Google Optimize Alternatives in 2023' for more details.

Wrapping it up

There are a lot of great CRO tools out there, and this list by no means covers all of them. But we hope that it has given you some insight into the different types of CRO tools and how they can be used to achieve different goals in the typical CRO workflow.


So when you’re making your decision on which CRO tool to buy, keep in mind that you need to have a clear goal. Are you trying to get user insights? Or do you want to measure what’s happening on your website? Based on your goal, you can narrow down your search and hopefully find the right tool to fit your needs.


That being said, getting reliable data quality and consistent traffic is a constant challenge for CROs and digital marketers alike. This is why we’ve created expoze.io - no more setting up A/B tests and trying to get enough traffic, just upload your interface into our platform and get an attention prediction result within seconds.


Want to A/B test your website in seconds? Get started! Try out your first 5 images for free.

‍