Boost Your Online Store’s Success with These 12 Essential CRO Tools

Your conversion rate is simply the percentage of people that visit your website and then make a purchase. So, if you get 100 visitors on your website a day and 2 of those visitors make a purchase, your conversion rate is 2% (not bad).

Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization is all about optimizing your store with the goal of increasing the number of website visitors that end up actually buying. 

Let’s say you undertake some CRO and increase your conversion rate from 2% to 5%. Now 5 of those 100 people who visit your store have now made a purchase – all without having to drive more people to your website – great!

Whether you’ve built your online store with an ecommerce website builder or a Content Management System like WordPress, all website owners should take advantage of CRO and the boost it can give your bottom line. Let’s take a look at 12 CRO tools that can help increase your sales.

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Discover the Average Website Conversion Rates in 5 Key Industries to learn more about what makes a good conversion rate in your niche.

Google Analytics (GA) is an entirely free platform created by Google and is super easy to install. GA provides website owners with valuable insights into key areas such as visitor traffic, engagement, conversion rates, and more.

It can help website owners improve conversion rates by helping them understand key areas of their website such as where visitors are coming from, how they interact with their content, how long they stay on a page, and how many of them take valuable actions such as buying a product or signing up for a newsletter.

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Learn How To Set Up GA4 in our full guide, to make sure you have the most recent version of Google Analytics for your website.

Hotjar is a great tool for ecommerce businesses, offering deep website analytics.

The most notable features include website heatmaps and session recording. This data allows you to really understand how users are interacting with your website. Ultimately, it will show you which website elements are working, which aren’t, and which parts of your website are causing people to leave without making a purchase.

Hotjar has a free version that offers limited access to its features, which is great for start-ups. As your business grows, investing in a paid version to unlock further insights will be beneficial. Prices range from $39 to $389 per month.

Heap is a fantastic behavioural analytics platform that provides insights into users’ interactions on websites and mobile apps.

The features on Heap include automatic event tracking, user segmentation, and funnel analysis. Ultimately, this will help site owners better understand how users are behaving on their website and which parts of their sales funnel may need addressing in order to boost conversions.

Heap has a free version which is great for start-ups and small ecommerce stores. To unlock advanced features, you’ll need to pay for Heap. This ranges from $3,600 per year.

Optimizely is a powerful and comprehensive CRO platform. It provides website and ecommerce business owners with the opportunity to seamlessly undertake experimentation on their sites and find better ways to engage and convert potential customers.

For example, store owners can use key features such as A/B testing (testing two pages with one variation to see which works best), customer personalization, and built-in analytics.

Optimizely offers a range of specialist tools such as content management, CRM, website testing, and monetization. They build and sell bespoke packages dependent on client needs, which means prices can vary widely.

As the name suggests, SurveyMonkey is a useful tool for undertaking customer surveys.

Well-designed and executed surveys can be highly valuable to website owners, helping them get a real insight into how customers interact and feel about their site. This customer feedback can then be directly fed into a CRO strategy, helping inform updates and changes.

SurveyMonkey offers an easy-to-use interface that makes it simple to create surveys and collect results. You can even build them directly into your website, to make the customer experience seamless. The results are then delivered in an easy-to-digest format.

You can use SurveyMonkey for free. But if you want to create longer, branded, and more dynamic surveys, plans start from $25 a month per user.

Google PageSpeed Insights is an entirely free tool that analyzes website performance and offers recommendations for improving page speed.

By using this tool you can quickly identify how fast your website and the pages within it load on different devices. Once you have identified pages that are performing poorly, you can use the insights and suggestions provided by Google to increase speeds. In turn, this will enhance user experience and potentially boost your conversion rate.

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Read through our report on Website Load Time Statistics to learn more about why fast loading speeds are so important.

Crazy Egg works in a similar way to Hotjar, offering website owners useful insights into website analytics, and providing heat mapping and user tracking capabilities.

By displaying visitor interactions with your website on an interactive heatmap, Crazy Egg can help you identify problem areas to improve on. For example, when you see where users are failing to scroll to your call to action (CTA) button, you may then make edits to your web design to show the CTA without the need to scroll.

Crazy Egg offers a range of pricing options that depend on several factors such as the website platform you choose and the level of insight you need.

VWO markets itself as the world’s number one A/B testing tool. So, website owners that are looking for a dedicated tool to test variations on their website should certainly consider this option.

The platform allows you to seamlessly test different variations on your website such as new features, different CTAs, or new page layouts. It then provides you with detailed analytics on just how well those variations have performed. Helpfully, VWO will also turn that information into actionable insight by providing you with bespoke suggestions based on your findings.

VWO offers a free option, which provides you with the most basic functions in a limited capacity. Large or growing businesses investing in a more advanced plan will pay dividends. These plans start at $386 per year.

Mailchimp is a well-known and loved email marketing platform. It can be used by ecommerce business owners to keep in consistent contact with their customers, distribute new content and educate potential customers on their products.

The Mailchimp platform makes it easy to collect customer data, design stunning emails, and automate your email marketing processes. It also provides insight into your email marketing campaigns including data on areas such as email open rates, links clicked, and unsubscribes. This data can help you drastically improve your customer experience and drive higher conversion rates.

You can use Mailchimp for free, but as your audience and needs grow you will need to move to a paid plan. Plans start from just $13 per month.

UserTesting provides ecommerce website owners with valuable insight into their real users.

The platform provides a range of tools that let you do everything from viewing first-hand videos of your customer using your website to offering easy ways to conduct, analyze, and act on user testing. This insight can then easily be applied to improving your site and increasing user conversions.

How much UserTesting costs depends on your selected plan and specific testing requirements.

Lucky Orange is another powerful CRO tool that offers users deep and helpful insights into the website journey of their visitors.

The tools you will find on the platform include heatmaps, session recordings, and chat integration. This provides website owners with valuable insights into user behavior and interactions, helping them to uncover the best ways to improve their site and boost conversions.

For example, Lucky Orange’s heatmaps could show a website owner where customers are clicking instead of moving ahead with a purchase. This will help them to reformat and optimize their product pages to encourage more seamless sales.

Lucky Orange costs depend on various factors such as the plan you choose and the traffic your website gets.

Mouseflow offers users a host of tools that can be used for CRO purposes. For example, users can view session replays, explore heat maps, undertake funnel analytics, and conduct form analysis using the platform.

Ultimately, Mouseflow will help you better understand your user behavior and offer you the data you need to make informed decisions on optimizing your site for conversions.

CRO is essential for store owners who want to get more from their store traffic and drive more profit. In this article, we’ve shown you some great tools which you can use to drive your CRO and increase your conversion rate. Many of them are free or have free versions – who said you can’t make money for nothing?

Use this guide to help you find a tool that perfectly meets your needs and helps you to boost your website’s performance.