A/B testing & Multivariate Testing Tools
These are must-have tools to run tests on your site.
Optimizely – The biggest player in the market. Fun fact: It was used by both the Obama and Romney campaigns during the last US elections.
VWO – Easy to use and powerful tool for all your A/B testing needs.
Adobe Target – Adobe Target is an enterprise testing tool that does a great job of leveraging a visitor-based metric system. They’re one of the most popular enterprise tools out there.
ChangeAgain.me – ChangeAgain.me provides a visual interface to Google Experiments for A/B Testing.
Conductrics – Conductrics is an advanced tool that offers methods from AB Testing blended with Machine Learning to deliver optimal experiences, for each user, automatically.
Convert.com – Convert.com offers “affordable enterprise testing and personalization.
Marketizator – Marketizator is another new player in the testing tool market. They position themselves as a sort of all in one optimization tool: pop-ups, on-page surveys, A/B testing, personalization, segmentation.
Maxymiser – Maxymiser is a powerful tool, one of the more expensive enterprise tools out there.
SiteSpect – SiteSpect is a testing tool that uses a proxy server, so it avoids many of the client-side problems and retains the robustness of server-side tools.
Heatmap & scrollmap tracking
What do people do on your site? Where do they click? How far down do they scroll? What gets noticed and what gets ignored? These tools will give you the answers.
SessionCam – my top recommendation.
Clicktale – A bit on the expensive side, but really good.
Mouseflow – Clickmaps, heatmaps, scrollmaps, recorded user sessions – you name it.
Inspectlet – The budget-friendliest option among these.
HotJar – HotJar does (almost) everything. In addition to their targeted polls, they also offer funnel tracking, session cams, heat maps, and more.
Lucky Orange – Lucky Orange offers an “All-in-One Conversion Optimization Suite,” including analytics, recordings, live chat, heatmaps, funnel analysis, form analytics, and polls.
Usability testing
Usability testing is the black horse of boosting conversions. If your site is difficult to use or hard to understand (means it has usability problems), it will result in poor conversions. These tools help you figure it out
UserTesting.com – Probably the biggest marketplace to finder testers.
Open Hallway – I like their monthly fixed fee option where you can do as many tests per month as you like. You can also recruit users from the marketplace.
TryMyUI – For $99 dollars you can have as many people as you want to be part of a usability test (when you recruit your own testers). They also offer an AI solution for session replay videos called Stream.
Ethnio – Recruit your own testers from website visitors. Very useful for recruiting testers.
Analytics tools
You need data to make the right decisions.
Google Analytics is awesome when you know how to use it. Mandatory for everyone.
KISSmetrics – Google Analytics tells you what happened, KISSmetrics tells you who did it.
MixPanel – for hardcore analytics people. This is advanced level stuff. It can tell you anything, but you have to configure it yourself.
Heap Analytics – Heap Analytics automatically captures every user action in your web or iOS app and lets you measure it all after the fact.
Amplitude Analytics – A newer player in the analytics space, but quickly gaining traction. Popular for behavioral cohorting and tracking for correlative events. Great dashboard features.
Email marketing
Email marketing is the cornerstone of any successful marketing. These tools help you rock it.
GetResponse – I could not live without it. This is my go-to choice for email marketing. It’s amazingly good and better priced than its competition.
Aweber – I’ve used it in the past and I know a ton of people who use it as their email marketing software of choice.
Intercom – Intercom is a rapidly growing startup that positions itself as an all-in-one customer communications tool. You can use it for live chat, support, onboarding, email automation, customer database, lead generation, and education/documentation.
Shopping cart recovery
Shopping cart abandonment means the loss of a customer who is going through the check-out process of an online store. It’s widespread – abandonment rate is north of 72%. These tools help you convert some of those abandoners into buyers.
Vero – Send emails to your customers based on their behavior. Can be used with any type of site.
Rejoiner – Built for online stores, it tracks shopping cart abandonment in real-time and helps recover sales
SeeWhy – Recover lost ecommerce sales by sending optimized email and social media messages to cart abandoners in real time.
CartRescuer – Another good one.
Bounce X – as part of their “Behavioral Marketing Cloud,” Bounce X offers a robust albeit expensive solution for behavioral email retargeting.
Landing page creation
If you do any type of promotions or advertising, you need landing pages. You can either hire the pros or use DIY landing page creator tools.
Landing Page Makeover – when you want the conversions pros to build you a high-converting landing page. (Disclaimer: I’m involved and will probably work on your landing page).
Unbounce – Build, publish and test landing pages. The leader in DIY landing pages.
Lander – The newcomer on the scene. Super simple to quickly build pages, no cost for unlimited landing pages.
Survey tools
Tools for sending out surveys over email.
Google Docs surveys – I love the simplicity. Free.
TypeForm – Most beautiful surveys.
SurveyGizmo – One of the most common survey tools.
Qualtrics – the leader in market research for enterprise organizations.
Web traffic survey tools
Qualaroo – Qualaroo is still probably the best at what it does.
HotJar – HotJar is great because it includes so many other conversion research tools as well as triggered surveys.
WebEngage – Another one.
Real-time personalization
Evergage – Nice balance of features and price.
Monetate – Enterprise level tool, also does testing. Expensive.
Granify – eCommerce personalization using AI.
Perpetto – eCommerce personalization suite, from recommendation engines to cart abandonment and more.
Form analytics
Cross-browser and cross-device testing
Email testing
Browser testing
Mobile devices
Perfecto Mobile – Mobile Devices Testing
Open Device Lab – Grass roots community movement. Shared community pools of internet connected devices for testing purposes of web and app developers.
Mobile App Testing
Screencasts
Camtasia Studio – I do all my tutorial videos and screencasts with Camtasia Studio. In fact I even use it for video editing. It’s awesome.
Web hosting and content delivery networks
Fast websites are crucial for high conversions. Here are web hosts and CDNs to use to speed up your site.
WP Engine – Web hosting made for WordPress. Blazing fast, fanatic support, stuff that dreams are made of.
LiquidWeb – shared hosting, dedicated hosting, cloud hosting, CDN. They have it all. If you need truly amazing support, they’re your choice.
Storm on Demand – the best priced cloud hosting service out there. Runs ConversionXL too. Amazing support.
MaxCDN – one of the more affordable CDNs. I use it on ConversionXL.
Cloudflare – Part CDN + part security service = Kickass.
Inscapsula – similar to Cloudflare, but has shown to offer a much better level of security / protection according to research.
Google mod_pagespeed – have your web host install this module onto your Apache web server.