The final session of the Conversion Conference didn’t show any signs of wanting to slow down the awesome amount of insights that were delivered by such a great line up of speakers at Conversion Conference 2012. The final session, entitled ‘Top 5 CRO Tools for Improving Site Performance’ brought a very simple task to Craig Sullivan and Rob Jackson; two of the biggest usability and CRO heavyweights in the industry, they simply had to name their favourite tools for improving site performance.
The talk title was somewhat misleading, because far more than 5 tools were mentioned, in fact an enormous 47 of the best CRO and usability testing tools were recommended by both Rob and Craig! Read on below to see how these tools can help you and check out the links to all of these recommended top tools…
Craig Sullivan‘s Top CRO Tools
1. Well Loved Web Analytics
- Properly instrumented analytics
- Investment of 5-10% of developer time – It might not always end up this amount, but set a goal and try to stick to it.
- Segmentation – Ensure that proper segmentation is simple.
- Call tracking – Connects offline events with online provide much richer data and insights on your users.
- UX of web analytics tools and reports – We spend all this time on our websites, but we spend little to none on the tools that uncover these valuable and actionable insights.
- Playability and exploration - “give some love to your web analytics”
- Time for sleuthing!
2. Feedback / VOC tools
- “Anything that allows you to ask your customers what’s wrong, or what they would make better, as they are doing it is incredibly value.”
- Kampyle
- Qualaroo (formerly KissInsights)
- 4Q
3. Session Recording
- “Vital for optimisers and fills in a ‘missing link’”
- Clicktale
- Mouseflow
- GhostRec
- Tealeaf
- UserReplay
- Tip: “If people are clicking on things that aren’t clickable then it won’t be recorded in web analytics, but it will in session recording”
4. Guerilla Usability Testing
- Mediacam AV (cheap option)
- Camtasia
- Silverback (Mac)
- Telestream
5. Remote & Crowdsourced Tools
- Whatusersdo
- User Testing
- Userzoom
- Usabilia
- Loop11
- Ethnio
- Feedback Army
- Mechanical Turk
- Open Hallway
- Webnographer
- Easy Usability
- User Feel
- Userlytics
- Kupima
- Pidoco
- Five Second Test
- ConceptShare
- “Notable mention for prototype and wireframe testing/feedback tools – these are essentially tools that allow you to upload your designs up and crowdsource people to supply feedback.”
6. Split Testing Tools – Cheap!
- Optimizely
- Google Content Experiments
- Visual Website Optimiser
- “You have no excuse but to split test on your website, this can be done incredibly cheaply…”
7. Testing Tools
- Browser testing tools
- Email testing
- Mobile devices
- Performance testing
Rather candidly Craig finished the talk saying that “without these tools he would no have a job”.
Rob Jackson‘s Top 5 CRO Tools
“Technology in itself is not going to do the job.”
A Framework for Conversion Success
- Test and implement hypothesis
- Find out what isn’t working
- Understand why
- Then build a business case for change
1. Universal Analytics (the new GA)
- You can now import any data that you want into Google Analytics (presuming it’s in the correct format). Read more about Google Analytics new features.
- Rob’s written a whitepaper on universal analytics, to get your hands on it then make sure you email Elisa DBI directly.
2. SessionCam
- UK based, cloud based session recording tool
- Allows you to understand all interactions within a browser
- Outputs include heat maps, segmentation, alerts and retargeting
- Integrates with analytics
Top Tip: Building a Business Case – Data visualizations can be incredibly powerful at ‘painting a picture’ without using tables and boring, hard-to-understand charts. You have to win over the influencers/budget controllers.
3. Gephi
- Free to download!
- ‘Open source graph visualisation and manipulation software’
- Maps visual relationships between data and networks
4. SiteSpect
- Testing can be hard - JavaScript based tools can have negative effects on page-load time, SiteSpect avoids this…
- User comes to a site, requests data from website – Sitespect reroutes this through a proxy server. Because of this, Rob said that he’s actually found that site speeds have increased in some cases when they started using this for some clients!
5. Segmentaliser / Cluster Fox
- It’s very difficult in Google Analytics to really compare lots of segments at once, we can identify them easily but it’s difficult to compare clusters or segments.
- Rob identified a tool that has been developed that allows him to do this called Segmentaliser / Cluster Fox, to find out more about this contact Rob directly.
Check out rob’s slides yourself below:
Stay up to date with the latest articles
Kind of sessionCam option was provided by the google analytics, but it’s now not working. I never have seen the list which you have provided for CRO very few of them I know it but now like to visit & see what they are providing.
Thanks for sharing such a great CRO list.
Arun Nair
Hi Arun, my pleasure – hope it comes in handy