4 Beginner Tools For Conversion Rate Optimization

Here’s the good news. There’s no need to sit at the feet of the reigning CRO guru (whoever that is) for 12 years to learn enough of this stuff to make a difference in your own sales process. In fact, follow along as we introduce a four-pack of easy-to-use beginner tools for effective CRO.

Conversion Rate Optimization – The Short Version

If you have any type of online presence, you should care about CRO. Without a decent process in place to capture and analyze traffic patterns related to how visitors arrive at, interact with, and eventually leave your website, you have no idea which parts work and which don’t. Simply put, being able to use a few powerful CRO tools allows you to figure out what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and how to do more of the former and less of the latter. Without at least a foundational knowledge in this area, you’re swinging at pinatas in the dark with a wet spaghetti noodle and, if you happen to make money, you won’t know why. Enough of our yapping. On with the tools.

#1 Feng-GUI

Feng-shui is an ancient Chinese art that seeks to arrange a person’s living or work environments in the most harmonious way possible. With a nod to its namesake, Feng-GUI is a handy bit of software that visits your URL and analyzes the home page’s visual elements in order to suggest which are most appealing and in what order they’re likely to be viewed.

Like Feng-shui, Feng-GUI is not an exact science. Its recommendations are possible thanks to machine learning and predictive analytics based on a large sample of websites. While it doesn’t track individual visitor behavior, consider Feng-GUI a good entry point that could offer insight into how better website layout.

Available as an online service, Feng-GUI offers three price points ranging from $25 – $250 per month depending upon how many and the frequency of analyses needed.

#2 Hotjar

This nifty little tool offers a range of CRO features for organizations large or small to track on-site visitor behavior. Here is a sample of included functionality:

• Heat Mapping: A nifty visual representation of where visitors look and click the most.
• Recordings: Have you ever wanted to look over the shoulder of individual visitors to see how they interact with your website? The ability to record mouse movement of real visitors is about as close as you’ll get.
• Conversion Funnels: Find out exactly where your sales funnel is broken by identifying the precise point at which visitors disengage from the process. And fix it!

Hotjar operates on a pay-per-volume basis. It’s free for analysis of up to 2,000 page views daily, $29 per month for up to 10,000, and goes up from there. It’s a great all-in-one CRO solution.

#3 YoRocket

Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to spend so much time and effort uncovering what was wrong with your website and, instead, just created it perfectly from the beginning? Well, perfect may be unobtainable, but YoRocket, a WordPress plugin, gives it the old college try with a little bit of help for your keyword-numbed brain struggling to write click-worthy title tags.

Too many people see this step as a big, fat chore that they can’t get done with soon enough. Here’s a scary statistic. The top three listings on a Google search result page get around 60% of all clicks. The other million and a half are left to scavenge for scraps.

With YoRocket, type a title into the plugin, and it comes back with different word choices and arrangements that suck in visitors like you’ve got a giant vacuum cleaner. Maybe.

#4 Google Analytics

This granddaddy of mostly free web analytics software was introduced by the search engine behemoth in 2005 and is still a favorite among website owners looking to analyze traffic to what is an astounding depth for what is essentially a free tool. Some features/functionality cost more, but there’s a lot of value to be had at no charge.

Final Thoughts

An interesting e-commerce statistic tells us that for every $92 spent to acquire traffic, only $1 is going to convert it into paying customers. Successful online marketers learn to even out these lopsided numbers with Conversion Rate Optimization. There are obviously many more tools on the market but this sampling is enough for the beginning web traffic analyst. Keep in mind that it doesn’t count as a success when someone merely visits your website. You need to know the precise journey they follow from stranger to repeat customer to raving fan. CRO metrics can give you that information on a silver platter.

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