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Last updated Tue Nov 05 2024

8 Best CRO Tools [2024]

The businesses that strive to improve their lead capture, visitor engagement, sales, signups, and grow faster than the rest, run on conversion rate optimization (CRO).

There are tons of conversion rate optimization tools out there to help with any CRO-related project, but some are better than others. I've tried and tested a bunch, and here are my best conversion rate optimization tools.

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analytics dashboard for onsite campaigns
CRO tools: summary
  • For CRO experiments, A/B testing, analytics, and lead capture: Wisepops

  • For CRO testing with heatmaps, visitor recordings, and funnels: VWO and Smartlook

  • For collecting customer/user feedback with surveys: SurveyMonkey and Wisepops

  • For customer data analysis and marketing automation: HubSpot

  • For analyzing website user behavior and reporting: Google Analytics

  • For personalized product recommendations: LimeSpot and AI Wishlist

Interested in CRO? Read these later:

This guide to conversion rate optimization has the basics. And these ecommerce CRO tips have effective strategies for online stores.

ecommerce conversion rate optimization

What are conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools?

CRO tools are software apps designed to help online businesses increase conversions with tactics including A/B testing, survey collection, marketing personalization, and analysis of visitor behavior. A combination of these tactics helps find problems, test solutions, and verify improvements in how effectively a website converts visitors into customers.

With CRO tools, you can tackle many projects, no matter how complex they are. Some common projects include marketing personalization (like targeting new or returning visitors with different offers in popups), A/B testing different marketing messages (headings, CTAs, images, etc.), and analyzing visitor behavior with heatmaps and recordings.

Categories of CRO tools

The list of the best CRO tools and platforms in this post includes options from these six categories.

CategoryTypical use cases
Lead capture toolsIncrease lead captures (emails, phone numbers) and qualification data
A/B testing platformsImproving conversions on landing pages, testing pricing variations, optimizing checkout flows, validating new features
Heatmap & session recording toolsUnderstanding user behavior patterns, identifying UI friction points, improving page layouts, reducing drop-offs, optimizing mobile experiences
Survey & feedback toolsGathering customer feedback, understanding cart abandonment reasons, validating pricing strategy, measuring customer satisfaction
Analytics & attributionTracking conversion funnels, understanding customer journeys, measuring feature adoption, analyzing user segments, tracking revenue metrics
Personalization enginesCreating personalized experiences, improving product recommendations, increasing average order value, boosting customer retention, enhancing email campaigns

Best CRO tools

  • Wisepops — CRO experiments, A/B testing, marketing personalization, lead capture

  • Survey Monkey — collect feedback with surveys, quizzes, and forms

  • HubSpot — marketing automation and lead management

  • Smartlook — Automatically capture every user interaction with your website or mobile app

  • VWO — testing, analytics, and optimization without coding expertise

  • Google Analytics — the go-to suite for user behavior and website analytics

  • LimeSpot — personalized product recommendations for conversions

1. Wisepops — advanced CRO experiments, A/B testing, marketing personalization, and lead capture

analytics dashboard for onsite campaigns

Categories: lead capture, analytics & attribution, A/B testing

Wisepops is a CRO platform designed to help with personalizing marketing messaging, website content, and offers to visitor groups and individual customers. It includes lead capture, marketing personalization, A/B testing, experiments, analytics, and product recommendations.

You get an easy way to do CRO experiments with your onsite campaigns in one dash. For example, you'll be able to create, run, compare, and optimize them by tracking metrics like ROI, attributed revenue, and number of pages viewed by a visitor.

In terms of lead capture, you can collect emails, phone numbers, and other data for lead qualification with popups, lightboxes, exit-intent campaigns, embedded forms, and spin-to-win wheels.

Thanks to 40+ advanced audience and page targeting options, your campaigns can be personalized and contextual. That means you can engage your new visitors and registered customers at the right page at the right point in their journey with your business.

For example, here are the options for audience targeting alone:

audience targeting popups

Review of Wisepops

If you're someone that appreciates the choice in formats to engage visitors, Wisepops has 100% customizable popups, embedded forms, sticky bars, and onsite notifications. So, you can capture and engage your leads in many ways, including the non-intrusive ones.

product quiz promotion

If you'd like to add more personalization to your campaigns, there's a lot of targeting rules available, including Shopify-specific ones:

creating a custom offers for shopify visitors

A couple of onsite marketing channels make Wisepops stand out among CRO lead capture tools: onsite notifications and AI Wishlist.

With the notifications, you can engage your visitors in a non-intrusive way from any page on your website with personalized messages:

feed on memo paris

And AI Wishlist gives product recommendations based on visitor behavior and the sales performance of your products.

This CRO feature is known to drive up to a 5% increase in sales (look for émoi émoi's case study below).

Here's AI Wishlist in action—

Check out the first message, with the recommendations:

ai wishlist feed

Next—

CRO analysis features.

You'll be able to understand visitor behavior based on the engagements with the campaigns you enabled, including the pages they visited and how much they spent.

One way is to do A/B tests with onsite campaigns. Creating tests is easy: duplicate the control campaign and make the changes:

a/b testing cro

Next, you can do CRO experiments to track goals and revenue and learn the exact ROI of our campaigns:

cro experiments dash

For every experiment, you'll get detailed insights, including attributed revenue per visitor, number of pages visited, and time spent on the website:

cro experimenting

Wisepops integrates with Salesforce, Shopify, Klaviyo, GA4, and other popular marketing and CRM software.

🔌 See all integrations.

What you can do with Wisepops:

  • Get detailed visitor and campaign engagement analytics with the experimentation tool (total revenue, time on site, average revenue per user, bounce rate, conversions, repeat rate)

  • Use advanced targeting to engage visitors at every step of customer journey on your website to increase CRO analytics

  • Do deep A/B tests for lead generation and other marketing campaigns on the website (test over five variations at once)

  • Increase average order value with personalized offers, up to an individual visitor level

  • Reduce cart abandonment with exit campaigns and pushes

  • Make AI-generated product recommendations on autopilot

  • Track incremental revenue and ROI

  • Collect feedback from visitors (NPS, open-ended questions, and more)

Pros:

  • Offers the same features as other CRO platforms at a lower cost (pricing begins only at $49/mo)

  • Very friendly to beginners, small teams, and non-technical users

  • AI-generated product recommendations on autopilot

  • Lead capture, detailed analytics, and A/B testing in one suite

  • Unique features for increasing website conversions: onsite notifications and AI Wishlist

  • All-in-one platform for converting visitors and nurturing them on the website

  • Integrations with all ecommerce platforms and popular marketing software

  • Deep integration with Shopify and Klaviyo

Cons:

  • No free plan (but a free trial is available)

  • AI Wishlist is compatible with Shopify only

Who uses Wisepops?

Mid-sized and large ecommerce stores, retailers, SaaS and B2B businesses.

Example: émoi émoi, a French fashion brand, increased sales by 20% and boosted the average order value by 23%: read the full story.

Also, see 20 ideas to use Wisepops to grow an ecommerce store.

"Wisepops empowered us to weave personalized touchpoints throughout the customer journey, seamlessly and without involving our technical team. This tool allowed us to translate the warmth and personal attention of our physical boutiques into the digital space, creating a uniquely émoi émoi online experience that truly resonates with our brand values of love and human connection."

Lucie Poirier, Digital marketing manager, émoi émoi

Lucie

Pricing:

You can use Wisepops with all premium features for 14 days for free. Paid plans begin at $49/mo.

🗒 See full Wisepops pricing

A special offer with personalized strategy planning and enterprise CRO coaching is also available: Wisepops ONE.

See for yourself how to do CRO with Wisepops—use the platform with all the premium features for free for 14 days:

No cc needed. Start using Wisepops in under two minutes

"Wisepops helped me in many ways. I increased my conversion rate with marketing messages displayed at the right moment thanks to their targeting options... Last but not least, it integrates very well within my stack (Klaviyo for emails and Postscript for SMS)."

Alexander B., Trustpilot

2. SurveyMonkey — collect feedback with surveys, quizzes, and forms

surveymonkey

Categories: survey & feedback tools

This is one of the best CRO tools when it comes to collecting visitor and customer feedback on websites. If you'd like to learn what your visitors like and dislike about your store or any of its features, prices, or page experience, you'll be able to create surveys to get that info.

Our experience with SurveyMonkey

I created a simple customer satisfaction template in about 10 minutes. Everything is very intuitive, so you definitely won't have any problems with the creator even without experience. Also, pre-saved templates, questions, and formats really helped to make a survey that asks all the right questions.

customer satisfaction template editing

The question bank was a feature that I found especially useful, as it helped to come up with deeper questions that could collect more meaningful feedback:

question bank for surveys

Although the customization features really lacked in the free version (especially in terms of colors), they were still enough to create an onsite survey that looked quite okay-ish.

Another features that deserves a mention was the AI survey builder.

It got what I was aiming for and made a survey with awesome questions in seconds, even though I only gave it one line: "I want to know why my visitors are leaving without buying:"

creating a survey

If you're planning to use this CRO tool for collecting feedback on large or multiple websites, you'll be glad to find that SurveyMonkey integrates with almost everything, including enterprise-level apps like Salesforce.

You can also add Survey Monkey quizzes to Wisepops forms.

What you can do with SurveyMonkey:

  • Create customer satisfaction surveys, NPS surveys, product review requests, UX surveys

  • Collect customer satisfaction feedback about purchases and products

  • Assess your software users' satisfaction

  • Learn what visitors think about your brand, logo, or messaging

  • Gather feedback from your corporate clients

Pros:

  • Intuitive survey builder

  • Plenty of templates (as well as custom campaigns)

  • AI campaign builder for more efficient process

Cons:

  • Form customization features are quite limited in the free plan

  • Advanced analytics are available in top-tier costly plans

Pricing:

There's a free plan for basic forms and features. Paid plans start at $25/mo for three users.

See full pricing.

3. HubSpot — marketing automation and lead management

hubspot dashboard

Categories: lead capture, analytics, CRM

HubSpot's Starter Platform combines essential marketing and business tools in one integrated solution. The AI-powered website builder lets you create and customize professional sites through simple drag-and-drop functionality. For content creation, the built-in AI writer helps generate website copy and social posts efficiently.

This CRO platform also includes useful features like landing page design tools that work seamlessly across devices and email automation capabilities that don't require technical expertise. You can track ad performance and manage ad campaigns while monitoring which ads drive customer conversion.

The CRO analytics dashboard provides data-driven insights for informed decision-making, helping you understand what works and what needs adjustment. All these tools work together in one system, eliminating the need to juggle multiple platforms for different business functions.

Our experience with HubSpot

HubSpot is a great suite to have if you'd like a clear view of your entire sales pipeline. The dashboards are intuitive and detailed, which allows to get CRO analytics and data needed to assess how your landing pages, emails, and forms are performing.

The revenue reports are super helpful, too—and you can easily track the ROI of individual campaigns:

revenue attribution dashboard

You'll gain real-time insights into your sales pipeline, providing valuable info for improving customer relationships and creating more effective marketing campaigns:

hubspot review

Wisepops has integration with HubSpot, too. This means you can easily sync all your new leads with this software.

What you can do with HubSpot:

  • Build landing pages in a drag-and-drop editor

  • A/B test landing pages, emails, and CTAs

  • Collect leads with behavior-triggered forms

  • Write AI-assisted text for landing pages

  • Test different page headlines and layouts

  • Monitor conversion rates by traffic source

  • Track visitor behavior flows

  • Generate conversion reports

Pros:

  • A CRM, lead generation, and sales platform in one app

  • Built-in email marketing features

Cons:

  • No SEO optimization tools

  • Dedicated A/B testing platforms have more advanced features

  • Some users find the learning curve steeper than anticipated

Pricing:

The CRM as well as many marketing tools are free. Paid pans begin at $20/mo per user (or $15/mo with an annual subscription).

See full pricing.

CRO case study

OddBalls, generated $50,000 with one onsite notification campaign with an extra discount.

oddballs-logo

4. Smartlook — Automatically capture every user interaction with your website or mobile app

watching visitor recording

Categories: Heatmap & session recording

Smartlook is one of the top conversion rate optimization tools for website heatmaps and user analytics. It's very easy to integrate with popular ecommerce platforms and gives deep in-depth user visitor recordings, making it a great choice for beginners and professional marketers alike.

In terms of CRO, you can use this tool to learn and analyze customer experience and engagement, and optimize your website or app based on real data.

Our experience with Smartlook

Smartlook gives good data to address the most common issues like things preventing shoppers from buying or a low conversion rate on important landing pages. And—what I really liked—everything is presented in an amazingly simple interface.

Look at this menu below—the main features are presented in a neat menu, so I was able to get started with sessions in two clicks even though I've never used this CRO tool before:

smartlook menu

Watching, replaying, and analyzing visit recordings was super easy. If you want the convenience of a user behavior analysis platform that also has a simple way of sharing the recordings with other team members, Smartlook would be a good choice.

recording menu

Just one click away is the Heatmaps section. The software does a good job of walking new users through the set up and even recommends pages for analysis on your website.

heatmaps on checkout

The Funnels feature is also intuitive, allowing to check how well your customer journeys are built. What I liked is that you can search the funnels by pre-defined events, eg. a change on a checkout page, and get instant answers in a very user-friendly way:

funnel analysis for cro

Smartlook, of course, integrates with most of the common CRO and A/B testing tools.

See Smartlook integrations.

What you can do with Smartlook:

  • Capture recordings of visit sessions automatically, including those based on your pre-defined filters

  • Learn about your users by recording multiple types of heatmaps: scroll maps, move maps, and click maps

  • Find bugs, errors, UX issues, and other issues affecting the experience of your website visitors or mobile app users

  • Get quick feedback on your website or app changes with funnels

Pros:

  • Free plan

  • Simple UI, easy to set up

  • Plenty of filters for session recordings (page, location, technology, events)

  • Easy to set up funnel tracking with custom events, like locations or specific pages

  • Record 100% of your traffic by default

Cons:

  • Saves only a one-month tracking record when used in the free version

  • Some popular integrations (Zapier, Zendesk, Intercom) are available only in costly higher plans

Pricing:

You can get 3,000 monthly sessions and basic analytics for free. Paid plans begin at $55/mo.

See full pricing.

State of Visitor Engagement on Shopify [Study of 500 stores]

Learn how the top Shopify businesses engage and convert visitors

Non-signup popup use cases on Shopify stores

6. VWO — testing, analytics, and optimization without coding expertise

analyzing cro with funnel

Categories: Heatmap & session recording; analytics & attribution

VWO is an advanced CRO testing tool offering heatmaps, analytics, A/B testing, experiments, and funnels, for websites and apps. And there's also customer experience assessment forms to allow you to get some feedback along the way.

Our experience with VWO

The first impression was: this software does a lot.

But you'll find the interface user-friendly, despite the vast array of features and options.

Take testing for example. You can do all three common types: A/B, multivariate, and split URL, as well as mobile app A/B testing. Creating the tests is easy thanks to the visual drag-and-drop editor; for some advanced testing, a developer-friendly code editor is available.

test example in ab testing

The rich feature set also includes the funnels to give you insights into how your visitors/users convert and what can be improved. Along with session recording and heatmaps, VWO's detailed funnel reports will be an invaluable source of precise data.

creating a funnel report

Whether you're testing a new homepage heading, changing the layout of products pages, or simply updating the colors of your CTA buttons, VWO will allow you to test these changes and evaluate their effect on the conversion rate.

What you can do with VWO:

  • Run A/B tests on almost any website or app element

  • Use the intuitive visual editor to make and test changes without coding, perfect for beginners and quick experiments

  • View heatmaps and session recordings to see exactly how users interact with your site and where they get stuck

  • Track complete conversion funnels to identify where customers drop off and why they abandon shopping carts

  • Measure the direct revenue impact of every test and change you make, with clear ROI tracking

  • Create personalized experiences for different customer segments based on behavior and location

  • Test and optimize across all devices, ensuring consistent experience on desktop, mobile web, and apps

Pros:

  • One of the most complete conversion analysis and A/B testing tools

  • Dedicated features for app feature testing and management

  • Detailed funnel reports for deep CRO experiments

  • Perfect for big marketing teams

Cons:

  • Can be quite costly, especially for small businesses

Pricing:

There's a 30-day free trial with most of the premium features, designed to allow users to get started with CRO experiments and testing. Paid plans for the VWO testing suite begin at $339/mo.

See full pricing.

7. Google Analytics — the go-to suite for user behavior and website analytics

conversion reports in ga4

Categories: analytics and attribution

Google Analytics (GA) is a free and must-use CRO tool for websites that provides essential data-driven insights. GA offers various report types, including real-time, audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversion reports.

While GA shows what's happening on a website, it should be combined with other CRO tools to understand why users behave in certain ways. The platform provides basic and custom reports, helping businesses track visitor behavior, identify drop-off points, and optimize conversion funnels.

What you can do with Google Analytics:

  • Track real-time website user activity

  • Analyze traffic sources and channel performance

  • Identify high-dropout website pages in conversion funnels

  • Compare performance across browsers and devices

  • Track both macro (sales) and micro (engagement) conversions

  • Measure landing page performance and content effectiveness

  • Monitor eCommerce metrics like cart abandonment

  • Create custom reports for specific conversion goals

Pros:

  • Free and effective

  • Reliable real-time analytics

  • Detailed visitor information and insights

  • Customizable reports

  • Compatible with all other top CRO tools

Cons:

  • No heatmaps or recordings

  • No customer feedback collection tools

  • Limited A/B testing capabilities

Pricing:

Google Analytics is free.

How to find conversion issues on your website with Google Analytics:

Website conversion funnel guide

funnel visualization report

8. LimeSpot — personalized product recommendations for conversions

limespot

Categories: personalization engine

For startups or small ecommerce stores, LimeSpot offers a great solution for launching product recommendations as a part of a CRO strategy. LimeSpot delivers personalized product recommendations by analyzing visitor behavior, preferences, and past purchases.

Our experience with LimeSpot

With this CRO platform, you can easily add sections and boxes with recommended products just about anywhere in your online store.

Plus, there are handy templates and ideas to help speed things up.

recommender boxes

For example, here's how you can add a box with recommendations to the checkout page to give customers some last-minute offers:

limespot adding recommendations

What you can do with LimeSpot:

  • Increase conversions with personalized product recommendations and upsell messages based on visitor behavior and order history

  • Personalize product search results by having LimeSpot's algorithms analyze each visitor's preferences and intent

  • Tailor your store's content (banners, hero image, call-to-action buttons) to give customers their own personalized browsing experiences

  • Add upsell and cross-sell messages to checkout pages

Pros:

  • Automatically test and experiment with product recommendations

  • All features available in the cheapest subscription

  • Do more experiments with the built-in email and SMS marketing features

Cons:

  • Available only for Shopify and BigCommerce

Pricing:

LimeSpot's pricing begins at $50/mo.

See full pricing.

Interested in checking out more similar apps?

7 product recommendation platforms [free & paid]

Summary

Using CRO tools is essential for effective conversion rate optimization strategies. These tools give the means to effectively analyze user behavior, conduct precise A/B testing, and generate meaningful insights that inform data-driven decisions—often, even without previous experience.

For more CRO insights, consider these resources:

Oleksii Kovalenko

Oleksii Kovalenko is a digital marketing expert and a writer with a degree in international marketing. He has seven years of experience helping ecommerce store owners promote their businesses by writing detailed, in-depth guides.

Education:

Master's in International Marketing, Academy of Municipal Administration

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