105 Best Resources for Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is the process of using data and user feedback to increase the percentage of visitors to a website that take any desired action. It is a scientific approach to optimizing websites and sale processes, and enables companies to convert more website visitors to customers.
Our team has scoured the internet for the best books, guides, tools, blogs, and resources on Conversion Rate Optimization. This is your one-stop destination for everything about CRO.
Best Books on Conversion Rate Optimization
It's overwhelming to learn Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, from blogs as they churn out hundreds of articles every day. I strongly believe reading books remains the best way to learn in the age of blogs and YouTube (updated and relevant ones, of course).
Here are the seven best books on CRO that I have personally read and highly recommend.
By Tim Ash, Rich Page, and Maura Ginty
This second edition of a bestselling guide to landing page optimization is a comprehensive guide to increasing conversions and improving profits.
It includes case studies with before-and-after results as well as new information on web site usability. It covers how to prepare all types of content for testing, how to interpret results, recognize the seven common design mistakes, and much more. Included is a gift card for Google AdWords.
Features fully updated information and case studies on landing page optimization
Shows how to use Google's Website Optimizer tool, what to test and how to prepare your site for testing, the pros and cons of different test strategies, how to interpret results, and common site design mistake
Provides a step-by-step implementation plan and advice on getting support and resources
By Chris Goward
This book guides you through creating an optimization strategy that supports your business goals, using appropriate analytics tools, generating quality testing ideas, running online experiments, and making the adjustments that work.
Conversion optimization is part science and part art; this guide provides step-by-step guidance to help you optimize your website for maximum conversion rates
Explains how to analyze data, prioritize experiment opportunities, and choose the right testing methods
Helps you learn what to adjust, how to do it, and how to analyze the results
Features hands-on exercises, case studies, and a full-color insert reinforcing key tactics
Author has used these techniques to assist Fortune 500 clients
The book explains both the "why" and the "how" of conversion optimization, helping you maximize the value of your website.
By Peep Laja
This book will teach you how to build your website in such a way that it converts visitors into leads or buyers.
Building websites that sell is not an art; it's a science. It's not about gut feelings and personal preferences - nothing to do with bells and whistles. You will learn how to optimize your website for sales, based on all the best research and experiments.
You start by defining a business objective for your website. What follows is careful planning regarding how to design the website in such a way that it produces maximum results. Everything you need to boost sales you will learn from this book - filled with straight-to-the-point advice and lots of examples. Everything in this book is based on in-depth industry knowledge and scientific research.
Why should you care about conversion optimization (the science of turning more visitors into buyers) in the first place?
It is the cheapest, quickest way to increase sales online. Think about this: if you’re currently converting at 1% (1% of your visitors buy your stuff), but can increase that to a mere 2%, you’ve doubled your sales.
This book will help you do better, smarter marketing. It's a must-read for anyone that wants to get more business from their website.
By Rich Page
Captivate your website visitors, supercharge your conversion rates and beat your online competition!
This hands-on conversion rate optimization and a/b testing resource steps you through the tools, best practices, test ideas and strategies needed to effectively optimize and improve any kind of website and generate more revenue from it. From a/b testing and optimizing calls-to-action and text to using advanced personalization and targeting techniques, you'll dive into the crucial areas of this exciting new field. This book also takes a unique approach by using best practices from web analytics, web usability and online marketing to help you get the most out of your website and conversion rate optimization efforts.
Zeroes in on fundamentals such as understanding key conversion rate metrics, choosing analytics tools, researching your visitors, and crafting a plan for what to a/b test and optimize
Walks you through a/b testing ideas for many types of web pages including the homepage, product and lead generation pages, and checkout pages
Guides you through important conversion rate optimization areas such as optimizing calls-to-action, navigation, headlines and images
Addresses advanced topics including mobile website optimization, paid search optimization, email marketing optimization, rich media, and more
Includes hundreds of a/b and MVT test ideas, 75 website optimization tools, and a website optimization checklist to help you with your efforts
Full of best practices and helpful examples drawn from the author's own experience, Website Optimization: An Hour a Day is the complete solution for anyone who wants to get the best possible a/b testing and conversion rate optimization results from their website.
By Bryan Eisenberg and Jeffrey Eisenberg
Evolving from the premise that customers have always behaved more like cats than Pavlov's dogs, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? examines how emerging media have undermined the effectiveness of prevailing mass marketing models. At the same time, emerging media have created an unprecedented opportunity for businesses to redefine how they communicate with customers by leveraging the power of increasingly interconnected media channels.
Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg don't simply explain this shift in paradigm; Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? introduces Persuasion Architecture™ as the synthetic model that provides business with a proven context for rethinking customers and retooling marketers in a rewired market.
Readers will learn:
Why many marketers are unprepared for today's increasingly fragmented, in-control, always-on audience that makes pin-point relevance mandatory
How interactivity has changed the nature of marketing by extending its reach into the world of sales, design, merchandizing, and customer relations
How Persuasion Architecture™ allows businesses to create powerful, multi-channel persuasive systems that anticipate customer needs
How Persuasion Architecture™ allows businesses to measure and optimize the return on investment for every discreet piece of that persuasive system
By Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa T. Davis
Call to Action includes the information businesses need to know to achieve dramatic results from online efforts. Are you planning for top performance? Are you accurately evaluating that performance? Are you setting the best benchmarks for measuring success? How well are you communicating your value proposition? Are you structured for change? Can you achieve the momentum you need to get the results you want? If you have the desire and commitment to create phenomenal online results, then this book is your call to action.
Within these pages, New York Times best-selling authors Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg walk you through the five phases that comprise web site development, from the critical planning phase, through developing structure, momentum, and communication, to articulating value. Along the way, they offer advice and practical applications culled from their years of experience "in the trenches."
By Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen
This book offers best practices and lessons learned from more than 300,000 experiments run by Optimizely customers. Optimizely is an A/B testing and personalization company co-founded by Authors Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen.
You'll learn:
What to test
How to choose the testing solution that's right for your organization
How to assemble an A/B testing dream team
How to create personalized experiences for every visitor
And much more
This book shows marketing professionals and business owners how to use a data-driven approach to make decisions, no matter your technical expertise.
Essential Training for Conversion Rate Optimization
If you prefer to learn about conversion rate optimization online, there are the best guides to get started.
By Qualaroo
This 12-chapter guide on conversion rate optimization is probably the best guide you will read on CRO. You will have a very solid understanding about CRO after just one hour.
By QuickSprout
This eight-chapter guide on conversion rate optimization by Neil Patel and Joseph Putnam is full of actionable advice, case studies, and infographics. It lives up to its name.
By Rick Page
This concise guide by Rich Page, author of the book Website Optimization: An Hour a Day, is informative and to the point. It also has a list of helpful resources at the end.
By UserTesting
This is a four-part email series on CRO from UserTesting.com, one of the best tools for A/B testing.
By BuiltVisible (formerly SEOgadget)
This guide introduces a 10-step process to conversion rate optimization. It even comes with a beautiful infographic.
This step-by-step guide on CRO is tailored for small businesses. Additional resources are provided for each step.
Landing Page Optimization
Landing Page Optimization is a big part of Conversion Rate Optimization. Learn how to optimize your landing page using the following resources. The resources have self-explanatory titles so I won't provide any additional information for each.
The Most Entertaining Guide to Landing Page Optimization You’ll Ever Read
36 Creative Landing Page Design Examples – A Showcase and Conversion Critique
12 Tests to Increase Your Landing Page Conversion Rate, Starting Today
25 Smart Landing Pages for Collecting Leads [+10 Tips for Your Next Page]
29 Landing Page Reviews That Show Why Clarity is the Key to Conversion
A/B Testing (Split Testing)
Split-Testing 101: A Quick-Start Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization
The Importance of A/B Testing: 24 Marketing Experts on Their Most Surprising A/B Test
7 Simple A/B Tests That Can Increase Conversions by 10% or More
Eight User Testing Case Studies That Achieved Amazing Results
How AMD Used A/B Testing to Achieve 3600% Increase in Social Sharing
Copywriting for Conversion Rate Optimization
Writing Home Page Headlines For The Modern World (3 Formulas That Work)
22 One-Sentence Stories That Will Emotionally Charge Your Marketing
7 Simple Copywriting Tweaks That’ll Shoot Your Conversion Rate Up
Don’t Be a Freakin’ Wallflower! Write Sticky Copy That Gets Noticed
Optimizing For Trust: How To Write Copy That Improves Conversions
5 Copywriting Strategies That Will Improve Your Conversion Rate by 113%
Free Webinar: Copywriting, Conversion, and Your Customer's Comfort Zone
Get Past the Brain’s Filters: Brian Massey’s Webinar on Killer Copy
10 Places You Can't Afford to Publish Mediocre Marketing Copy
Are You Following these 5 Headline Writing Tips for Better SEO Traffic?
Conversion Rate Optimization for E-Commerce
Conversion Rate Optimization for Email Marketing
Conversion Rate Optimization for Mobile
It is a huge mistake if you don't optimize your website for mobile devices. More people are getting their information on mobile, and Google penalizes sites that are not mobile-friendly.
These tips will help you optimize your websites for mobile.
Case Studies
Learn Conversion Optimization from hundreds of real case studies with screenshots and results.
Techniques and Tips
Conversion Rate Optimization Round table – 11 Conversion Rate Experts Weigh In
The Top 10 Conversion Rate Optimization Tips We Learned from Interviewing 60+ Experts in 2014
How To Do Conversion Rate Optimization When You Don't Have Much Traffic
5 Psychological Studies on Pricing That You Absolutely MUST Read
54 Quotes from Startup Leaders on How to Improve Conversions
5 Conversion Rate Optimization Tips From 5 Revealing Studies
Best Blogs on Conversion Rate Optimization
ConversionXL - one of the most prominent Conversion Rate Optimization expert Peep Laja blogs about everything CRO: A/B testing, research, UX design, copywriting, more. A must-read blog on CRO.
Unbounce Blog - the official blog of Unbounce, a landing page creation tool. One of the best blogs on landing page optimization. You will get some great tips and a few laughs along the way.
SiteTuners Blog - Tim Ash's influential blog on landing pages, conversion rate optimization and marketing in general. Ash is the CEO and co-founder of SiteTuners and the author of the book Landing Page Optimization.
Rich Page Blog - insightful blog from Rich Page, author of the book Website Optimization: An Hour a Day.
Conversion Rate Experts Blog - don't be misled by the less common hyphenated domain name. This is one of the best blogs on CRO from Conversion Rate Experts. Founded by Ben Jesson and Dr. Karl Blanks.
Conversion Sciences Blog - official blog of Brian Massey, the Conversion Scientist.
WiderFunnel Blog - from the outspoken Chris Goward who has done landing page optimization for Fortune 500 companies. A must read for anyone serious about CRO.
KISSmetrics Blog - get amazing tips on optimization, analytics, testing and marketing in general.
Optimizely Blog - official blog from Optimizely, an A/B testing and personalization company co-founded by Dan Siroker, Director of Analytics for the Obama 2008 campaign.
Marketing Experiments Blog - learn conversion rate optimization through numbers and scientific data. A very cool blog from MECLABS Institute, a research laboratory.
Bryan Eisenberg - from best-selling authors and conversion rate optimization pioneers Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of New York Times bestselling books, Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark? and Always Be Testing.
ContentVerve - authoritative blog on how to write the best content for conversions.
Leadpages Blog - official blog of Leadpages, one of the best landing page creation platform.
Moz - CRO - advice and tips on Conversion Rate Optimization from Moz, the SEO expert.
Copy Hackers - get copywriting tips for conversions from well-known copywriter Joanna Wiebe and optimization expert Lance Jones.
Best Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
Best conversion rate optimization software and tools for A/B testing, landing page optimization, copywriting, traffic generation, use tracking, and feedback gathering.
1. Qualaroo
Qualaroo is a great tool to get qualitative feedback from site visitors using live surveys. You can then use data from these surveys to change your site to improve conversion rates.
2. Unbounce
Unbounce is a powerful landing page builder with built-in A/B testing feature. You can choose from 200+ professional landing page templates.
A powerful tool that automatically optimize headlines for your WordPress blog.
4. SumoMe
Effective tools to drive more traffic to your site, including List Builder, Heat Maps, Share, Scroll Box, and 8 other tools.
5. UserTesting
Find real users to test your website or app and see their reaction through recorded videos as they perform your specified tasks.
6. Optimizely
Optimizely is a powerful A/B testing and personalization tool created co-founded by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen. With Optimizely’s visual editor, you can create an A/B test on your website easily. This tool that makes a complicated process fun and easy.
7. Crazy Egg
Find out how users click and scroll through your website using heat map.
8. KISSmetrics
KISSmetrics tracks real people and finds your best customers—where they originally come from, what they do, and who buys.
VWO is A/B testing tool to tweak, optimize and personalize your website with minimal IT help.