The Best A/B Testing Tools for your Conversion Optimization Toolkit
There are a ton of software tools on the market. Many businesses set them and forget them. I see a lot of business set their tools up and forget what they were trying to learn in the first place.
As the founder of Experiment Zone, an experience optimization agency, I’m careful to choose tools based on the value of the insights they provide. My philosophy is to identify a specific research question first before getting into how we’ll collect it.
When you focus on why you’re using the tool, you’ll avoid a tsunami of inactionable data that doesn’t answer your questions.
Table of contents:
What are the main types of tools out there?
1. Tools to collect insights to generate good ideas
This helps you did into the data and ask why it’s happening. You’ll answer questions like:
- “Where are my visitors getting stuck?”
- “Why are my visitors leaving my site on this page?”
2. Tools for managing test ideas
This helps you focus on the best test ideas. You’ll answer questions like:
- “What test ideas should I start with?”
- “What should my A/B testing roadmap look like?”
3. Tools for running A/B tests
This allows you to measure the impact of your ideas. You’ll be able to answer:
- “What was the revenue impact of that UX change?”
- “How do my customers respond in the real world to these theoretic improvements?”
For more hard questions, check out my deck 11 essential marketing questions you should be asking your business that I presented as part of Zoho’s CRO Masterminds series.
Tools for Uncovering Insights
Your A/B tests are only as good as the ideas you are testing. Here are our favorite tools to gain data and insights to inspire effective AB Tests.
1. Hotjar
Hotjar and other click tracking tools provide low-cost and visual insights to show how visitors use your website. You can see how visitors interact with a page and move through your site. With Hotjar, you can also set up surveys to get feedback from visitors. Read our Hotjar guide to get more value from your click tracking tool.
What can you learn? Click tracking tools are great for understanding where visitors focus their attention. Do they scroll to your primary CTA? Are their clicks focused on high value buttons?
2. Ethnio
To understand why visitors behave the way they do, you should set up usability studies. You can use a tool like Ethnio to intercept visitors and invite them to participate in your remote UX research, online exercises and surveys.
What can you learn? Get feedback from your actual visitors. Why are they on your website? What is confusing about your site or product?
3. Five Second Test
Every landing page should run through the Five Second Test by Usability Hub. This tool presents a site for 5 seconds before asking a question (which you choose).
What can you learn? First impressions of new visitors. Do new visitors understand what this website is offering? Do they understand what action they can take on my site?
4. TryMyUI.com
Good usability testing pinpoints the biggest pain points for your site visitors. You can recruit participants, share tasks with them, and get video recordings of sessions using tools like [TryMyUI]{www.trymyui.com] and UserTesting.com.
What can you learn? You can pinpoint the biggest blockers to conversion on your website. What confuses visitors to my site? Can visitors easily navigate and purchase a product on my website?
Tools for Managing Test Ideas
You can’t — and shouldn’t — test every idea on your website. Testing requires time, traffic, and money. By managing and prioritizing your tests, you can focus your experimentation efforts on high ROI opportunities. Read more about how to best score your test ideas.
1. Google Sheets
A simple, collaborative spreadsheet tool like Google Sheets can be a great starting point for teams. You can keep a running list of the test ideas and use formulas to calculate scores for each idea. Google Sheets often falls short as teams expand and need a more robust solution for prioritization and test project management.
2. Asana
A project management tool like Asana or Trello can help your team understand what tests are being worked on and what is coming up next. These tools can be used in conjunction with prioritization meetings, but fall short for scoring and prioritizing ideas remotely.
3. Hypothesis Library
We have to include our product, the Hypothesis Library. This tool is perfect for remote teams collaborating on collecting and evaluating test ideas. You can keep track of your test roadmap and results all in one place.
Tools for A/B Testing
1. AB Tasty
AB Tasty is a comprehensive tool for website conversion rate optimization. It is a user-friendly tool capable of running A/B tests as well as multivariant tests (4.4 stars on G2).
2. Google Optimize Free
Google Optimize offers one of the best free A/B testing solutions around. You can get a lot done with the free version of these tools — if you have the team on board to know how to set up the tests and advanced tracking (4.4 stars on G2).
3. Optimizely
Optimizely is a robust A/B testing solution for enterprise. They offer a variety of products — and Optimizely Web provides the A/B testing for optimizing web pages. You can build on this with Optimizely Personalization, which targets specific messages and experiences based on audience segments (4.3 stars on G2).
4. VWO
VWO is another robust A/B testing solution but at a lower cost than Optimizely. It’s an almost-enterprise testing solution (4.1 stars on G2).
5. Convert
Convert is an advanced A/B testing platform for CRO experts and agencies. This is a tool designed for experienced professionals, with advanced features easily accessed throughout the interface (4.7 stars on G2).
Bonus: Build-in A/B Testing
- A number of landing page builders offer split testing. These are reasonable places to get started with A/B testing, although you do miss out on being able to optimize the full user journey. A few examples include Instapage and Unbounce.
If you’d like 3 recommendations on which strategies your site could leverage and get pointers on what tools to use, sign up for a free conversion report card from yours truly — no strings attached.
Did I miss anything on this list? Drop us a note or leave a comment if you have any additional recommendations you’d like to see on this list.
