With conversion rate optimization, strategy tends to be only half the battle. To execute a CRO strategy successfully, marketers must put on their lab goggles and test theories like true scientists. And testing requires the right tools-- which will deliver results without breaking the bank.
Today, we are going to be discussing some of the best and most affordable conversion rate optimization software on the market. Whether you want to focus on research, analytics, or testing, there’s a tool out there that’s right for you!
As with any marketing software, choosing a CRO software is all about your company’s needs, priorities, and goals. For instance, your team’s level of skill and experience, or lack thereof, may place user-friendliness, simple setup, and customer support from the vendor at the head of your “must-haves” list. On the other hand, you may prefer to focus on sophisticated analytics and deep data.
Company size and type (B2B vs. B2C) are also major factors, both in choosing the tool itself and selecting the best pricing plan offered. Mobile optimization, shopping cart assistance, and Shopify integration indicate a good match for an eCommercebusiness, and navigating between free and Premium or Professional plans will require an assessment of the quantities of leads and conversions you are seeing monthly.
Ultimately, it is important to be honest with yourself about the strengths and weaknesses of the company and your team. By choosing the tool that will address pain points precisely whiling offering the necessary accessibility and versatility of features, you can truly get the best bang for buck. So let’s get to it!
SurveyMonkey is an online survey software that can help improve customer satisfaction, engagement, and market research by reaching out to different audiences to gain insight into their preferences. Users can create custom surveys, quick polls, or request customer or employee feedback. The free version of the software enables retrieval of demographic information, content surveys, and product feedback.
Cost: Freemium. Standard Monthly, Standard Annual, Advantage, and Premier plans are offered at $37, $31, $32, and $99 a month respectively, ranging in advanced features such as additional user accounts, A/B question types, and data extraction through third-party software.
UserTesting is a user research platform for receiving customer feedback quickly on everything from your site to mobile apps to “real world” experiences. This can be applied extensively to CRO, as participants from your target demographics will provide feedback as they are asked to test certain features or complete specific tasks.
UserTesting is useful as a research tool due to its ability to help identify pain points in your customer experience before design decisions are finalized, as well as provide comparative feedback with competitors’ websites. The Pro plans also offer access to a professional services team, which can create research objectives and test plans for your company.
Cost: Individual plans with 15 video sessions for $49 each as well as a variety of free testing features, and Pro plans with customizable pricing.
CRO and SEO (search engine optimization) have a complicated, but undoubtedlystrong relationship; elements of SEO research, such as keywords, apply to CRO research as well. For this purpose, the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool is a free-to-use feature within Google AdWords for building strong keyword lists.
By using the tool, you can search for keyword and ad group ideas, see how a list of keywords might perform by examining historical trends, combine keyword lists to create new ones, and receive click/cost performance forecasts. Filter geographically and by comprehensive criteria like suggested bid, average monthly searches, and competition for the keyword.
Cost: Free!
In addition to their click, question, and preference tests, UsabilityHub specializes in five-second user tests that can be used to receive feedback on everything from home page designs to landing pages. Users are asked questions about what they remembered of the pages they were shown after 5 seconds; the tool then generates a word cloud of commonly occurring keywords to provide insight into people's first impressions.
Cost: Freemium. Basic, Pro, and Team plans are offered at $79, $199, and $396 monthly for tiered access to split testing, demographics information collection, and accessibility for larger teams.
Kissmetrics is an intelligence platform that lets users determine and track a variety of metrics. Their data model is comprised of 4 core components: people, traits, events, and properties. The platform allows users to segment customers, learn how visitors navigate your website, build data sets and reports, determine campaign ROI, and initiate campaigns.
With highly flexible custom data and easy-to-navigate API, Kissmetrics is a solid CRO analytics solution, and additionally incorporates features segmentation and email campaign automation. It also offers several tiered plans; while on the pricier end of the tools in this article, the scope of available features can be well worth the cost if you know how to make the most of them.
Cost: The Growth plan costs $500 monthly; Power costs $850 for greater testing and campaign capacity; custom Enterprise plans are call-for-pricing.
Hotjar gets right to business with user behavior analytics through recordings and heatmaps, representing their clicks and scrolling behavior digitally as well as showing recorded interactions of visitors with your site pages. Other features include form analysis, feedback polls and surveys, and conversion funnels. In that way, it’s closer to an all-in-one CRO tool with research and testing components in addition to its main analytics goal.
Cost: Multiple pricing plans are available within three tiers: Personal, Business, and Agency. From a free Personal Basic plan to an $89 monthly plan for small businesses to a $989 plan for much larger companies, flexibility in price is one of Hotjar’s best assets.
A benchmark of marketing analytics software, Google Analytics is both highly affordable and packed with features. Traffic tracking, user activity monitoring, funnel visualization, audience reports, flow visualization, and custom analytics are included. Focusing on user friendliness, GA’s approach is to show both high-level, dashboard-type data and more in-depth data further into its reports.
Google Analytics 360 is the paid alternative of the tool for large companies in need of high-end functionality. It offers more integrations, advanced funnel reporting, unlimited data, and more custom dimensions and metrics per property. For many companies, however, the cost (or lack thereof) of the basic version of the software is unbeatable.
Cost: Free! The 360 software, on the other hand, starts at $150,000 annually.
Woopra is a CRO platform that can help you to better understand your customers’ behavior across multiple devices and touch points by using data to build comprehensive user profiles and automatically updating profiles in real time. Customer Journey Reports map paths taken by users to conversion in order to reveal obstacles and opportunities at each touchpoint, while Retention Reports explore user retention rates and the channels through which they are continuing to interact with your company.
The tool also creates customer segments based on demographics and behavior, as well as custom live dashboards based on core KPIs. In addition, Woopra integrates with numerous major third-party apps and sends real-time notifications to your device when customers perform important actions.
Cost:Freemium, with up to 30,000 actions a month. Small business plans with varying quantities of actions are available from $80 to $600 monthly, while scalable Enterprise plans, with premium features and integrations, are custom-priced.
Crazy Egg’s main feature consists of A/B testing, accompanied by Snapshots and Recordings. Snapshots refer to four ways of recording user behavior on your site pages: heatmaps, “confetti” distributions, scrollmaps, and overlays (with the exact number of clicks per element), while Recordings track users’ real-time behavior. In these aspects, the tool is similar to Hotjar.
The A/B testing component is designed to be fast and simple, with a page editor to give you the power to change individual elements with ease. While Snapshots and Recordings are limited depending on your plan, A/B tests are uniformly available in unlimited quantity.
Cost: Basic, Standard, Plus, and Pro plans cost $29, $49, $79, and $189 respectively, varying mainly in the number of pageviews, snapshots, and recordings per month.
Unbounce’s platform is built around headline testing and optimization, A/B and multivariate testing, building targeted pop-ups, and “sticky bars” (similar to banner ads.) With geo-targeting and mobile optimization, this may be a good choice for eCommerce marketers. Additionally, Unbounce focuses on custom landing pages, designed with easy editing in mind through the software.
Cost: $99 monthly for the Essential plan; $199 and $499+ for the Premium and Enterprise plans respectively, offering greater numbers of landing pages, popups, and “sticky bars.”
VWO has a simple, yet feature-packed platform broken down into a five-step system. Funnel analysis provides a breakdown of conversion rates; digital activity recordings can be used to observe and test visitors interacting with multiple paths on your site, as well as define customer segments of varying complexity; finally, on-page surveys can also provide direct feedback. More importantly, these features allow the tool to shine in its testing capabilities.
A/B, multivariate, mobile site, landing page-focused, and split URL testing can all be managed intuitively with the visual design-oriented layout of the software. Combining testing with research and analysis, VWO is testing-oriented, but well-rounded enough to be considered an all-in-one. Understandably, it’s the pricier of the tools in this section.
Cost: The Growth plan begins at $299 monthly, with the $599 Pro plan and the custom-priced Enterprise plans offering higher-capacity features for larger companies.
This is a relatively straightforward, yet essential CRO testing tool designed to analyze your site speeds. You can filter by load order, file size, and load times, and review total requests, load time, and page size, or generate a “waterfall chart” of all the individual requests on your web page. Every element of every page can be tracked through your performance history. The tool provides a score out of 100, then outlines next steps to take to increase your speed.
Cost: Free!
With no shortage of options on the market, there's no need to compromise on price when choosing a CRO tool that can give your conversion rates the boost they deserve. Keep researching until you find one that works for you!
Want a free tool for analyzing your landing pages to identify opportunities for optimization? Download the 20-Point Landing Page Audit we use for ourselves and our marketing clients.
This blog is part of Your Definitive Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization blog series.