This article has been contributed by Georgie Peru.
So you have a stunningly designed website that’s generating a lot of traffic, now what? Time to generate conversions!
Admittedly, you’ve done a lot of the legwork by driving traffic to your website in the first place, but unfortunately, that’s not going to be enough to sustain your business or push sales.
If you really want your website to be a success, you or your marketing team are going to need to get on top of conversion rate optimisation (CRO). Why? Because if you don’t, those hundreds of browsing web visitors won’t get to the point where they press ‘buy’.
Since you’re in this business to make money, let’s talk about what CRO is and what tools you can use to boost conversions on your site.
What is CRO?
If you divide the number of conversions your website receives by the number of visitors you have, then multiply that by 100, you’ll get a conversion rate percentage. CRO is about making changes and enhancing your website, social media and content in order to increase conversions.
If your website has a high conversion rate, you’re likely doing something right. To increase conversions, you need to encourage your website visitors to take action, whether that’s signing up to a newsletter, purchasing a product or leaving a comment on your blog.
While types of conversions are different, the ultimate goal is always to squeeze more value out of your leads to grow bigger and better than the competition. But, other than spend hours clicking through native website analytics, what can you do to track and improve web conversions?
Here are 12 tools we think will help you out.
1. BuzzSumo
Technically, BuzzSumo is a tool for creating better content… but hear me out! Most of your traffic will be coming from organic search and a lot of that will be via blogs and articles. So, it makes sense to optimise your content strategy to increase your website conversions.
BuzzSumo is a powerful tool that allows you to discover high-performing content so you can identify areas and topics that are doing well. Content that receives backlinks and gets shared across the internet undoubtedly does better than content that lays stagnant.
This tool is incredibly easy to use and should be part of your CRO toolkit. Simply enter your keyword or topic into the content research tool and view popular content alongside its social media shares, number of backlinks and date it was last updated. Use this info to create new content to drive better traffic to your site or identify your top performing content and then update it to better convert.
BuzzSumo’s pro edition is available from $99 per month and includes unlimited monthly searches, content analysis reports, backlinks, influencer searches and lots more. Alternatively, you can try any of their plans (Pro, Plus and Large) for free for 7 days.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the world’s most popular web analytics tool. It’s free to use and provides detailed information on the types of visitors your website receives.
You can really drill down into the depths of your website’s data, analyzing how your visitors found your web pages, where they came from, what their interests are, their age and location, and how long they spend on each of your site’s pages.
Google Analytics is a really useful tool for uncovering demographic data. Use it to uncover your biggest leaks (which pages lose you the most visitors) and update those pages so they drive visitors down your funnel and not off-site.
3. Hotjar
Hotjar is the most popular web heatmap tool. It allows you to dig deeper into the behavior of your website traffic. Heatmaps are a fantastic way of tracking what your visitors are doing because they track how they move around your site and what they click on most on each page. From this information, you can understand:
- Which CTAs are working and which ones aren’t
- Which pages are being viewed the most
- How users move from page to page
- What information, graphics, button styles or text is most catching their eye
Hotjar also analyzes your website visitors’ behavior, showing the number of sessions it has tracked, how many visitors left a particular web page without interacting with anything, and how many dropped off the site completely.
This kind of data offers plenty of opportunities to see what is and isn’t working on your website, giving you the power to improve areas of weakness and focus on boosting conversions.
4. Intercom
Intercom is a conversational relationship platform that grew out of the conversational commerce trend. It offers instant messaging tools that allow you to connect with your website visitors and potential customers on social platforms and on your website.
If you’re wondering how an instant messaging service can increase conversions, it’s simple really. 79% of consumers prefer live chats as they can get an instant response. That instant response could make the difference between a customer purchasing and not purchasing a product – especially if they have an urgent question about your product or experience a problem at checkout.
With integrated chat tools, you can answer your potential customer’s questions, find out if they need any help, and assess whether they’ve had a good or poor experience. This kind of data transforms Intercom from a live chat tool into a CRO tool that will help you boost your website conversions.
5. LuckyOrange
So much of CRO is about discovering why people aren’t converting. If you can uncover this information, you can optimize your website to increase conversions by resolving whatever negative user experience issue is getting in the way.
Lucky Orange is an all-in-one CRO tool. It allows you to analyze website traffic data to find out where your visitors are coming from and how they found you, as well as view historical statistics.
Lucky Orange can automatically create recordings with heatmap overlays that show how website visitors are using your site to identify why they aren’t converting. You can easily see where people are dropping out of your funnel and filter recordings based on specific information.
Lucky Orange has a free 7-day trial, and prices start from just $10 per month.
6. UsabilityHub
UsabilityHub allows you to run multiple tests to get direct feedback from real users about your website. Did you know that 94% of a person’s first impression of a business relates to its website’s design? I don’t need to tell you just how important it is to make a good first impression. The last thing you want is to appear unprofessional, dated or boring straight off the bat. Especially when making a great first impressions can lead to higher conversions.
With UsabilityHub you can discover how users interact with your website, test interfaces, interactions, forms, and lots more through first click tests. And if the hands-off approach isn’t for you, you can opt to directly ask users what they think of your website by running a survey or preference tests.
By sourcing real data from your actual website visitors, you can understand what makes them tick, giving you the opportunity to optimize your website and content so it works hard to convert.
7. Formisimo (Zuko Platform)
Formisimo is an analytics tool that goes far deeper than much of the competition by focusing its energy on analysing web forms.
You can pull data from individual forms, assess abandonment, field time and field returns percentage rates, and compare overall form stats. Zuko can analyze and track all of your forms, giving you sight and understanding of how your website visitors interact and behave with your forms.
You can use statistics like ‘time on form’ and ‘form abandonment rate’ to decide how to edit your form to maximise conversions and then test different options before you commit to a specific change.
8. Improvely
Improvely helps you track your website visitors and offers specific data to optimize your marketing efforts. It also detects click fraud, which will save you money from your advertising budget that you would have wasted on fraudulent link clicks.
Display ads have an average of 0.19% click-through-rate (CTR), but 20% of all pay-per-click (PPC) clicks are fraudulent. Instead of throwing money away, Improvely can alert you to signs of suspicious activity so you can put a stop to it.
Improvely also has specific CRO applications that allow you to analyze the behavior of real people who visit your site. It highlights their activity – like visits and clicks – so you can optimize your website to increase conversions.
9. Website Grader (Hubspot)
Powered by Google Lighthouse, Hubspot’s Website Grader offers you an overview of your website’s performance, speed and SEO. Whilst web design is a key factor in how your users behave on your site, they may not stay long enough to form an initial impression.
Website speed is a determining factor in bounce and abandonment rate, as well as SEO rankings. Website Grader will analyze your website and provide insights on page speed, page size, mobile responsiveness and security.
The tool offers suggestions on how you can improve your website’s speed – e.g. by choosing the best web host, reducing image sizes, installing an SSL certificate and more. These quick wins will set you up for success to increase conversions on your website.
10. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a popular marketing and CRO tool that peels down to the deepest layers of your website analytics. Data is linked to a real person on an individual level, as opposed to session-level like it is with Google Analytics.
Whether you’re looking to increase conversions on a SaaS or eCommerce site, Kissmetrics can optimize your site to offer the most valuable features to each of your customers.
Kissmetrics is unique in that it can integrate with your email service provider, which allows you to identify specific ‘user groups’ to target segmented email campaigns at, by analyzing their behavior.
11. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer
David Ogilvy famously said “On average, 5x as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you’ve written your headline, you’ve spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” Which means you need to invest time and effort into crafting powerful headlines if you want to turn visitors into buyers or subscribers on your website.
Headline Analyzer is a useful tool that analyzes any headline that you enter into the search bar. It will rank the strength of your headline on a scale of 0-100 to help you determine whether your page headlines are having a negative impact on your website conversions. The results take into account word usage, word categories, word balance, grammar, vocabulary and lots more.
But it’s not just about writing a headline that gets a high score, you also need to consider whether it:
- tells your audience what they need to know in a clear and easy to digest way.
- is likely to inspire, captivate or intrigue your audience so they keep scrolling down your page.
- will make people feel the way you want them to feel when they land on a specific page.
- is the right tone and style for your target audience.
If you can nail the headline, you’re on your way to securing better website conversions.
12. Slack
To round up this guide to the best website conversion tools, we wanted to talk about communication – because securing high conversions is not a one-person task, it takes a whole team, from developers to designers, copywriter, content marketers, advertisers and more.
So, even though it’s not specifically a CRO tool, we think your CRO stack needs a bit of Slack. Slack is a free messaging and online collaboration app that is free to use. It offers a place where you and your team can collaborate, organize and talk to each other in a highly organised and efficient way.
Best of all, it integrates with apps your team probably already uses, like Google Drive and Office 365. This means you can share documents, arrange conferences and meetings and anything else that drives website conversions in one place.
Conclusion
The tools in this article are designed to help improve your website conversions. From site analysis to in-depth customer behavior reports, you can find a complete stack of CRO options that will work for your business and your team. Ultimately, CRO comes down to understanding what your customers want and knowing how to deliver it for them. We hope that with these tools, you’ll be well on your way to doing just that.
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About the author: Georgie Peru is a Content Contributor for Hosting Ninja. She is passionate about sharing her enthusiasm for technology through her content writing work, with a mission to help others learn and understand what makes the digital world so successful.
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