One of the biggest problems with building a new product is that you have no clue what your potential customers want to use or see in your product. If you want to convert more leads and make more sales, you have to understand why your customers are using your product. You have to understand why users aren’t converting. At my previous company, I did a decent job of driving traffic to our blog and our site, but I always struggled with knowing why users aren’t converting.

For example, I had a good amount of success with user signups after being featured on Product Hunt, but most users weren’t converting. I never knew why and I didn’t invest enough time into figuring out why they didn’t convert. Big mistake. Later on, I realized a lot of people sign up for different reasons. Some users just sign up to see your product’s UX. Some are interested, but may not want to pay you. Some expect some sort of feature, but we didn’t have it. I wish I could have dived deeper early on. Fortunately, we have a lot of software tools that we can use today to help you learn more about what you’re users are thinking and doing on your site.

I compiled a list of 11 tools you can use to help you with that.

1. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is an awesome tool created by Neil Patel and Hiten Shah. It’s one of my go-to tools for heatmaps. Heatmaps are important because it shows you what your users are clicking on.You’ll be surprised at the things that you can learn from using Crazy Egg. For example, with Crazy Egg, you can see the things that your customers are clicking on that they aren’t suppose to be. For example, one of our customer that’s a blogger noticed that people were clicking on a picture of a food that she prepared. She later learned through surveying her audience that they were actually trying to share her photo with their friends. She set up a Pinterest sharing plugin within her WordPress blog to fix that issue.

Crazy Egg starts at $9 a month. Worth the value!

2. Google Analytics

This is the bread and butter app that every marketer and product person should be using. Web analytics software is essential for understanding your visitors. It tells you detailed statistics about the visitors to your website, where they came from, and which links they clicked on once they arrived.

There are a lot of apps that you can use for website analytics such as Mixpanel , but Google Analytic is free and it’s a robust solution to your website’s analytics. Google Analytics can also track referral traffic including search engine, direct visits, website referrals and marketing campaigns (Pay Per Click, Banner advertising, e-mail marketing etc.) One o the things that I love most about Google Analytics is how you can set goals to see how many conversions you are getting. This allows you to narrow down where your users are dropping off in the funnel and where the majority of your users are coming from.

3. UserTesting

UserTesting.com is a website dedicated to finding your website’s biggest problems in a short amount of time, and then providing you with the information and feedback you need to improve your site’s usability.

UserTesting.com gives you the ability to create a test for your website and then have real people take the test and give you feedback via video recording, while they are using the site. You can also ask them follow up questions for further information.

What’s amazing about UserTesting is that you can actually see an actual person using your product. The tester doesn’t only use the product, but they actually talk about it throughout their process and share their thoughts. This is a gold mine for all product managers, UX designers, and founders.

Let’s say you notice that two testers are struggling to understand a certain part of your product, you can work closely with your team to fix that issue. Another great thing is that you can test both web apps and mobile apps.

Pricing: Starts at $99 per video.

4. UXCam

Since we’re already talking about watching what your users are doing on your app, then everyone should check out UXCam. UXCam helps find and fix usability issues by pinpointing UX issues and letting you watch videos of your user interaction.

With 2 lines of code that take 2 minutes to integrate, UXCam can capture and visualize a range of UX data to help developers better understand how users interact with their app and make informed decisions that improve its usability.

Understanding your users and getting their feedback is one of the best methods for improving your product design and UXcam can help with that.

5. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a mobile and website visitor analytics tool designed for SMBs and enterprises. Mixpanel goes beyond recording simply page views and reports upon customer engagement and actions within the app. It enables you to drill-down further into your analytics and ask more specific questions about your customers.

Through customer segmentation and funnel analysis, use Mixpanel to drill-down and better understand the value of each marketing channel.

Mixpanel measures visitor engagement within a site in real-time, tracking visitor movements, views, shares, likes and purchases. It allows you to measure what customers do in your app in to-the-second real-time and compare your metrics from weeks before.

I used Mixpanel heavily when I was Head of Growth at Iron.io and loved it. With Mixpanel, I was able to see exactly what each one of my users was doing on the site and how many actions they made. I was also able to see how often they were coming back and where did they come from. Another thing I loved was the cohort analysis feature. It was a lot more useful than Google Analytics’ cohort analysis.

6. Hotjar

Hotjar is a complete website and mobile analytics tool enabling web developers, UI designers, analysts, digital marketers & more, to optimize the usability and conversion rate of their websites.

Hotjat combines both analysis and feedback tools to give users insights into how vistors interact with their site, how they could improve that user experience and ultimately, how they might increase conversion rates. With Hotjar, users can think like an actual website visitor, understand their mindset and identify UX issues that are frustrating to them.

Through features such as heatmaps, visitor recordings & funnels, Hotjar enables users to visualize visitor interaction on their site, understand where drop-offs occur and identify areas for improvement. More direct visitor feedback can be garnered from visitor-facing, features such as customizable surveys and polls which come with support for over 20 languages.

7. GetFeedback

Talking about the importance of customer feedback, everyone should check out GetFeedBack. GetFeedback is designed for business professionals who want to gather feedback from customers, partners, employees, website visitors, or anyone else, using professional, branded, attractive, and high quality surveys.

GetFeeback helps you create mobile-ready online surveys in a short amount of time and lets you view the results in real-time through graphic representations of data. The app was designed to compliment the devices and platforms used in the modern era, such as smart phones, tablets, and browsers, as well as your websites, social media channels, and email. With GetFeeback you can create professional, high quality and branded surveys using your own colors, fonts, logos, and images. You can also embed photos and video.

Aside from creating your own customized surveys, GetFeedback helps with the process of sending and tracking feedback. The app does this through integrations with Salesforce and other systems, as well as on Open API, to automatically sync email survey sending with your customer lists. You can then monitor the results as they come in in real-time with analysis tools and push notifications.

GetFeedback is more of an enterprise product, but what I personally love about them is their amazing design. It’s like a whole image creator platform in one place.

8. Survicate

One of the best ways to gather feedback is by using a website widget. This allows you to capture a mass majority of the audience that haven’t signed up yet. Survicate allows you to run short surveys on your website to ask visitors and customers questions.

You can actively gather feedback and adjust the website and services to their needs and improve their experience or create surveys from scratch or use a library of pre-defined templates.

One of the things that I love the most about Survicate is how you can define the targeting. For example, if you only want the widget to capture feedback from certain pages, you can adjust that.

9. Verify

Find out what users think of your screens or mockups before they go live by using Verify. Testing ideas and getting feedback before implementation in this way can help you save tons of time and reduce unnecessary rework.

Verify lets you test screenshots of your design work to gain valuable insights on your users’ expectations and reactions to your apps and websites before writing a single line of code. Your team will love the great-looking, actionable, reports that will help them make informed design decisions.

One of the strongest feature about Verify is how you can filter out the demographics and where the users are coming from, which makes it a lot more powerful when it comes to learning more about what your users are thinking.

10. Your Phone

This one is for fun! What’s a better way to communicate with your customers and get into their brains? Pick up the phone and literally call them! Don’t be afraid to speak with your customers. Steli Efti from Close.io talks about how sometimes you need to literally knock on your customer’s door in order to a close a deal!

Your customers are the ones that are paying you and they are going to be your advocates. They will be the ones that will refer you to even more high profile customers. Get on the phone for 10 minutes with every customer and you will be surprised by how much knowledge you can gain from a simple call!

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