[last update of this post: April 19, 2017]
Conversion rate optimization may be the marketing discipline that has the most technology to choose from. While doing research for my landing page best practices article I’ve stumbled over more than a 100 tools you could relate to CRO.
69 of these solutions made it in today’s StackScape™, spread over the following 10 categories:
- Web Analytics
- Page Speed Analysis
- In-page Analytics
- Eye tracking (simulation)
- Landing Pages
- Live Chat
- A/B Testing
- Forms & Surveys
- User Testing
- Visitor Feedback
- Customer / Product Analytics
Before going into the details, this is the most current version (March 2017): 
You can also download the pdf version with clickable logos. Now let’s quickly dive into each of the categories.
Web Analytics
This category hardly needs any introduction, but it is good to know there’s more than just Google Analytics out there, especially for enterprise advertisers. And if you’re a publisher, you also may want to consider Chartbeat.
- Recommend resources:
- Free(mium):
- Affordable:
- Enterprise:
Page Speed Analysis
The bad news: your website is probably too slow, especially on mobile. And it hurts your conversion rate. The good news: there are plenty of free tools to analyze your pages and tell you how to increase your page speed:
In-page Analytics
These tools are all about analyzing visitor engagement on your website by generating heat maps of mouse movements and clicks and by recording individual visits you can replay. Many of these tools also offer additional features, all aimed at better understanding why visitors may not reach their goals on your website.
- Recommend resources:
- Freemium:
- Affordable:
- Mid-market:
- Enterprise:
Eye Tracking (simulation)
While the tools above can tell you where the mouse moved, they can’t track eye movements. These three solutions can help you with that:
- Feng-GUI (affordable) and EyeQuant (mid-market) are eye tracking simulators, software that predicts how the human eye will look at images you provide.
- While LookTracker (affordable) provides actual eye tracking studies with focus groups.
Landing Pages
These tools are all about quickly creating and testing high-converting landing pages, without the need for IT or developers. Especially for lead-gen campaigns, you’ll want to use one of these tools.
- Recommended resources:
- Affordable:
- Enterprise:
- ion interactive: way more than a landing page creator, but a complete interactive content platform starting at $2,000 / month. I like how they just put that starting price on the website (not many enterprise solutions are that transparent).
Live Chat
If you like visiting software vendors’ websites like I do, you’ve probably noticed that someone always start to chat with you when you’re looking at the pricing page. These tools will enable you to chat with your visitors, which is known to boost conversions (and it’s always good to learn from the questions they have):
- Recommend resources:
- Freemium:
- Affordable:
A/B Testing
Many of these tools do much more than just A/B testing, but it’s the core functionality they all have in common. Everyone agrees you should always be testing, but be sure you have enough traffic and conversions to get significance in a decent amount of time. These free calculators can help you determine if A/B testing makes sense for you:
Significance calculators:
- Adobe Sample Size Calculator
- Evan Miller’s Sample Size Calculator
- Online Dialogue’s Sample Size & Test Duration Calculator and Power and Confidence visualisation tool
- Optimizely’s A/B Test Sample Size Calculator
- RJMetrics’ A/B Test Significance Calculator
- VWO’s A/B Split and Multivariate Test Duration Calculator
And now for the actual software:
- Recommend resources:
- The Forrester Wave™: Online Testing Platforms
- G2 Crowd – A/B Testing and Personalization includes landing page tools, which I’ve separated in its own category above.
- TrustRadius – A/B Testing and Personalization
- BuiltWith – A/B Testing
- Siftery – A/B Testing
- SimilarTech – A/B Testing
- Free:
- Affordable:
- Mid-market:
- Enterprise:
Forms & Surveys
You can track, test and analyze yourself silly, but you should also ask people about their motivations, barriers, preferences and satisfaction. So it’s time to add some qualitative data in the mix with one or more of these tools.
You can also use one of the tools in the ‘Visitor & User Feedback’ category (lower on this page) for this purpose. And some of the in-page analytics tools offer polling and feedback features as well.
- Recommend resources:
- Free(mium):
- Affordable:
- Enterprise:
User Testing
Before launching a complete new website or important landing page, you may want to test it with a few users to get valuable, qualitative feedback.
And the good news is, you only need to test it with 5 users to find most of your usability problems.
- Freemium
- Affordable:
- Mid-market:
Visitor & User Feedback
Closely related to the the ‘forms & surveys’ category above, but in this case feedback management is integrated in your website or app, instead of asking questions through a form.
- Freemium
- Affordable:
- Mid-market:
- Unknown pricing:
Customer / Product Analytics
If you have an online subscription-based business (like SaaS), you’ll want to get behavioral (event-based) insights about your visitors, leads and customers that go further than standard web analytics can provide. This is where the tools below come in.
- Freemium:
- Mid-market:
I hope you’ve found some interesting tools to add to your toolbox and as always: feel free to let me know if you think a great tool or category is missing in the comments below!