Learn / Guides / CRO guide

10 CRO tools and tips to improve UX and increase conversions

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools collect data about your website and its visitors to help you understand how people use your site and identify and test potential changes to increase conversion rates.

Marketing, ecommerce, and web performance tips

There are a lot of CRO tools to choose from, so we’ve put together this list to make your search a bit easier. We’ll go over ten popular CRO tools:

And we’ll throw in a bonus CRO testing tip to help you get the most out of a few specific tools (spoiler alert: Hotjar is involved).

10 popular CRO tools

1. Google Analytics (GA4)

Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool, installed on over 33 million websites. GA4 helps you track traffic patterns, traffic sources, and goal conversion rates in real time. You can also track common metrics like sessions and session duration, and identify where visitors exit or what web pages have high bounce rates.

💡 Pro tip: set up Hotjar’s GA integration to combine your Google Analytics and Hotjar data. Using Hotjar and GA4 together will help you uncover the most important information about your users—so you can make the right changes at the right time, and have the greatest impact on the user experience (which can boost conversion rates).

2. Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics tracks real-time multichannel analytical data across various sources (your website, email marketing, kiosks, apps, and more). Use Adobe Analytics to examine user flow, measure key performance indicators (KPI), and monitor conversion rates. Users of Adobe Analytics appreciate the visually appealing reports, which are easy to understand.

3. Heap

Heap is another real-time web analytics tool that gives you in-depth information about users’ interactions on your website and app. Heap tracks important metrics like page views and sessions, and form analytics like clicks, field changes, and form submissions, helping you understand how people use and interact with your website.

4. Hotjar

Hotjar (hey there! 👋) is a behavior analytics and conversion rate optimization suite that helps you measure and track user behavior and feedback. Over 1.3 million websites use Hotjar to help them improve UX and increase conversions.

Tools like Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings help you identify pain points a customer experiences on your site—like website bugs, a confusing design, or broken links and elements.

Feedback tools like on-site surveys and feedback widgets give you voice-of-the-customer (VoC) feedback so you can learn from real users what they like and dislike about your site.

But it’s Funnels that make Hotjar one of the best conversion rate optimization tools out there, helping you identify where and why users drop off in your conversion funnel.

Hotjar helps you identify pain points in the customer experience so you can start improving UX and increasing conversions today.

Try Hotjar today

5. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a website heatmap and testing tool that helps you collect and evaluate visual data and test changes to your site. Crazy Egg can also be used to observe how users behave on your website. Read our comparison of Hotjar vs Crazy Egg for a more in-depth look at what our tools have in common—and how we’re different.

6. FullStory

FullStory is an analytics tool for measuring digital interactions a user takes across multiple channels. FullStory offers heatmaps, session recordings, and bug tracking, which can help your team identify barriers and improve user behavior on your website and mobile app. Read our comparison of Hotjar vs FullStory to see which tool will help your business.

7. Optimizely

Optimizely is a digital experience platform that lets you create content and run tests and experiments to improve conversions. Besides managing your content, Optimizely lets you run tests at scale, refine customer interactions, and validate new features in a single platform. Optimizely also includes built-in tools specifically designed to grow your ecommerce business.

💡 Pro tip: filter recordings and surveys based on your experiments with the Hotjar and Optimizely integration.

8. Instapage

Instapage is a landing page builder that focuses on personalization and behavioral targeting. It helps you create unique landing pages tailored to different audiences—use Instapage to serve dynamic content to your visitors based on who they are and test different elements on your web page to create a tailored experience for every audience segment.

9. HubSpot

Hubspot is a CRM platform that connects data, teams, and customers to help you grow your business. With its Marketing Hub, HubSpot provides marketing automations to help you convert leads into customers. Capture users’ contact details with forms and dedicated landing pages to convert abandoning users later.

💡 Pro tip: with the Hotjar-HubSpot integration, send your Hotjar Survey responses to the HubSpotCRM automatically to have them appear in your contact timeline.

10. HelloBar

HelloBar is a lead capture software offering a variety of popups intended to convert your site visitors into leads, subscribers, and buyers. HelloBar provides a high level of personalization, from the type of popups (bars, modals, alerts, sliders, and page takeovers) available on their free plan to their styling. It also comes with built-in tracking and analytics for you to optimize your campaigns.

💡 Bonus CRO testing tip

Hotjar can help you measure user behavior and get feedback from real visitors while you’re A/B testing changes on your site.

For example, you can monitor A/B tests with heatmaps to see how visitors move, tap, or scroll on different versions of a page. And on-site surveys give you VoC feedback directly from real users: just place a survey on an optimized page to find out what they think of the changes.

Why CRO tools aren't just for testing

After going through this list of CRO tools, it might seem odd what we’re about to say, but the truth is: CRO tools aren’t just for increasing final conversion rates.

A lot happens before a visitor converts—it's what's known as the customer journey—and if you use CRO tools only to increase some numbers on a quarterly report, you’re missing the most important piece of the puzzle: the people behind the conversions; your customers. A user-centric approach to CRO focuses on understanding the

Drivers that bring people to your website
Barriers that make them leave (and prevent them from converting)
Hooks that convince them to convert so you can give your visitors the best experience possible on your site.

💪 Learn how: create a 3-step, user-centric CRO plan to improve your conversion rates using the tools we mentioned above and a customer-first mindset.

FAQs about CRO tools

CRO tools collect data about a website and its visitors to help site owners understand how people use their site, and to identify and test potential changes to increase conversion rates. CRO tools help to:

Understand what visitors are doing on a website
Understand why website visitors behave in a particular way
Identify opportunities for improvement on a website
Implement and test changes to a website—either through A/B testing or multivariate testing

CRO tools generally fall into four categories:

Web analytics CRO tools to understand what’s happening on your website: understanding what’s happening on your site is an important part of conversion rate optimization—without knowing what’s going on (or what’s going wrong), you won’t know where to look for improvements. Web analytics tools gather numerical, quantitative data about your website and its visitors, giving you insight into metrics like bounce rate, sessions, session duration, and common drop-off or exit pages.
Behavior analytics CRO tools to understand website visitor behavior: understanding why visitors behave a certain way on your website is another important part of conversion rate optimization—without knowing what your visitors want, you can’t give them what they need. User behavior analytics tools gather qualitative data about how visitors use your website and why they behave a certain way on your site.
CRO testing tools to compare and measure changes on your website: once you’ve identified potential improvements, testing tools help you compare and measure changes to see which version(s) converts better. But remember, the goal with CRO is not to completely redesign your site. Use CRO testing tools to learn how to improve the user experience and the customer journey (and help visitors make it through your sales funnel).
Lead capture tools to get another chance at converting users later: more often than not, your users won’t convert during their first visit to your site. Lead generation and capture tools improve your odds of converting those website visitors later. With functionalities like built-in forms, exit-intent popup CTAs, and more, those tools help you grow your email list. It’s then up to your marketing campaigns to turn those site visitors into customers.

In our customer-centric CRO program, there are three steps to CRO:

Find out what drives people to your website: why are they coming to your site in the first place, and what are they looking for? Use on-site surveys to gather information from real visitors to understand what they expect when they land on your site.
Find out what prevents potential customers from converting: what is causing your visitors to exit before they buy your product, fill out a form, or sign up for your service? Use behavior analytics tools to identify barriers that are getting in the way of conversions.
Find out what persuades visitors to act: identify what’s already working so you can understand how to convert future visitors. A post-purchase survey will give you insight into what your visitors liked (and disliked) about their experience on your website.

After gathering the above information, you can implement and test changes on your website.

Expert tips

Previous chapter

CRO benefits

Next chapter