By Patricia Puig, on 29 January 2025
When developing a CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) strategy in marketing, you'll need to rely on various tools that can help your teams to collaborate more effectively and make it easier to conduct testing across different channels.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the best CRO tools available. We’ve categorized them according to their utility within each phase of a CRO strategy to help you quickly identify the ones you need. A typical CRO strategy consists of the following stages: research and analysis, hypothesis development, testing, reviewing results and suggesting changes, and ongoing optimization. With that in mind, let’s dive in!
CRO Tools for Research and Analysis
In this phase, the goal is to understand how users interact with your site, identify potential issues, and uncover what may be impacting your conversion rate. Both quantitative and qualitative tools are useful here. Below are some of the most valuable options for each type.
Tools for Quantitative Analysis
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a staple for any CRO strategy, offering a wealth of insights into your website traffic. It tracks user activity, including the number of visitors, average session duration, top-performing pages, and click patterns. With its extensive data capabilities, it’s an indispensable tool for any CRO toolkit.
Adobe Analytics
Prefer Adobe’s ecosystem? Adobe Analytics provides similar functionality but is more robust and better suited for larger companies with over a million monthly visitors. Unlike Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics comes at a cost—packages range from $30,000 to $150,000 annually, depending on features.
Matomo
Matomo positions itself as an alternative to Google Analytics, focusing on user privacy and data ownership. It's a great option for smaller businesses looking for a paid solution without sacrificing transparency. Matomo is especially popular among nonprofits and government agencies.
Heap
Heap stands out for its user-friendly interface and the ability to pinpoint exact friction points in your customer journey. It records user sessions, allowing you to analyze their movements throughout your site in detail.
Kissmetrics
Designed for beginners, Kissmetrics simplifies user behavior tracking with an intuitive dashboard and seamless integrations. It's a great choice for small businesses new to CRO.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel bridges the gap between quantitative and qualitative analysis by offering collaborative features and a behavioral journey mapping tool. It visualizes the impact of your CRO changes and is highly intuitive for team use.
Tools for Qualitative Analysis
Hotjar
Hotjar is a comprehensive qualitative tool featuring heatmaps and session recordings to show where users engage most—and least—on your pages. It also offers a "Feedback" feature, enabling users to leave direct comments on your site.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg provides heatmaps, user recordings, and error detection. It also includes A/B testing capabilities, making it versatile for multiple CRO phases. On top of that, it analyzes traffic.
It seems that they specialize in providing support to marketing agencies, e-commerce businesses, and the education sector. In addition, they allow you to integrate Shopify.
Clarity
This free Microsoft tool combines heatmaps and session recordings with statistics, offering a robust option for businesses on a budget. Its integration with Google Analytics provides deeper insights into user behavior.
Inspectlet
Like Clarity but paid, Inspectlet includes advanced filtering options to zero in on key user segments. Like Crazy Egg, Inspectlet is also equipped with A/B testing functionality, so you can use it in another phase of your CRO marketing strategy.
Smartlook
Smartlook merges qualitative and quantitative analysis, providing a holistic view of user journeys and insights for improving their experiences. Both types of analysis are important in a strategy of this type in order not to leave anything behind and be able to apply effective changes.
Tools for Hypothesis Development
After gathering sufficient data, the next step is to hypothesize why certain behaviors occur and propose solutions. These tools can facilitate brainstorming and collaboration.
Miro
Miro’s collaborative brainstorming platform helps teams map out and organize hypotheses visually. It includes templates and tools for easy idea sharing.
Notion
Notion is a management tool with AI support, ideal for organizing projects and aligning team efforts. It doesn't have as powerful visual resources as Miro, but you can use it for the same purpose of keeping all teams aligned and organized in a marketing CRO strategy. It is equipped with notes and database integration features as well.
Google Docs/Sheets
Google’s free, collaborative tools are straightforward but effective for documenting and sharing hypotheses. Although they are simpler than the previous options and do not have as many functionalities or graphic resources, these tools are equipped with what is necessary to bring ideas together.
Mural
Similar to Miro, Mural integrates with Microsoft AI, Copilot, to assist teams in brainstorming and organizing ideas.
Tools for Testing
Now it’s time to validate your hypotheses. Use these tools to conduct A/B tests or multivariate experiments on your website or other platforms.
Optimizely
One of the best A/B testing tools, Optimizely ensures fast site performance during tests. It also offers collaborative spaces for team members to share ideas. Finally, it has analytics functionalities that monitor the outcome of the tests, as well as very simple design functionalities that allow smaller brands to avoid having to resort to developers.
Adobe Target
Adobe Target supports A/B and multivariate tests across all brand channels. This CRO tool even makes it easy for you to perform such tests on a daily basis, which is interesting considering that nowadays users' motivations and needs are very changeable.
Again, Adobe's prices are usually above other solutions on the market because they include very advanced features, so we recommend it more for large companies that can allocate significant resources to the implementation of CRO strategies in marketing.
VWO (Visual Website Optimizer)
VWO allows you to run complex tests across multiple devices and channels. It also supports split testing, enabling you to compare two completely different site versions.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s A/B testing feature is included in its Pro and Enterprise Content Hub packages. It is a fairly intuitive tool with a complete resource library that randomly divides audiences into test groups, simplifying setup.
Tools for Reviewing Results and Suggesting Changes
After running your tests, you’ll need tools to analyze results and propose improvements. While some previously mentioned tools like Mixpanel or Crazy Egg work here, these options focus specifically on visualizing data.
Looker Studio
Formerly Google Data Studio, Looker Studio offers customizable reports and templates to present test results clearly. Its interface is very easy to use and is equipped with a rich selection of templates so you can capture your results however best you see fit. If you use the Google environment to develop other phases of your CRO strategy, this platform is a must-have.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a more advanced data analysis tool that allows you to analyze and segment the results in a deeper way than the previous option. It is a good option for large companies.
Tableau
Tableau converts raw data into actionable insights using AI-powered visualizations. It adapts well to businesses of all sizes. Tableau helps greatly to accelerate data-driven decision-making, as it is an environment in which professionals can visualize in a very intuitive way the valuable information hidden in the data. Additionally, it is perfect for companies of all sizes, as it adapts perfectly to the needs of each one.
Tools for Continuous Improvement
For ongoing monitoring and optimization, revisit the tools used during the analysis and testing phases. Continuous CRO efforts are key to maintaining and improving performance over time.