What is Free CRO Tool

If you're looking for a tool that will help you conduct ABn tests on your website whilst keeping your technology costs low or free then Free CRO Tool could be what you're looking for.

Since google have sunset their website optimization tool (Google Optimize) September 2023, many that wish to continue testing enhancements or changes to their web site have to opt for a paid solution where the costs of this may mean that testing programmes are now abandoned. Free-CRO-Tool hopes to help these smaller business or teams with offering a free platform to continue conducting tests.

How is Free CRO Tool Free?

If you're willing to make a few compromises you can run a modest CRO programme for free. To be totally transparent there are some compromises that need to be made to run it completely free but they're not major and could be exactly what you're looking for.

The following table illustrates how you can run your programme completely Free with potential caveats

StrategyApproachPotential Caveat
Test HostingGoogle Tag Manager
  • Developer copy and paste code into GTM is slightly laborious
  • Other pending tag changes delay publishing of testing tag
  • Publishing the tag with GTM can slow down development workflow
Test HostingWe host for you
  • Slight cost for hosting of the JS files that contain your test logic
Test HostingSelf host
Test AnalysisGoogle Analytics
  • Manual test analysis, using some simple maths you can calculate the winning variant of a test but it takes time and leaves room for human error, but it's FREE!
  • Google Analytics Unique count approximation More details here on Hyperloglog limitations, but basically under the hood Google Analytics uses a probabilistic approach to counting events which leads to sacrifice in terms of precision to boost efficiency. This can mean that on occasion Google Analytics will present misleading metrics.
Test AnalysisBigQuery
  • Modest cost to us (Report generation and greater insights) and Google (Google to cover data storage and query execution). This expense will however save you having to manually analyse testing metrics and leave less room for human error.
  • Google analytics needs to be configured to push event data to BigQuery but this is
  • Reports can be almost realtime if BigQuery is setup with billing information.

What you need to be able to use the Free-CRO-Tool

A Website

This is where the tests will be conducted

Your site can be a traditional website broken down into discrete pages, or built as a Single Page App (SPA) using a modern framework like React or Vue. So long as there are distinct page URL's or meta data on the page that we can use to identify where a visitor is on their journey through your site we can initialise and conduct tests.

What you need to do

Add a small snippet of Javascript to each page via code or your Content Management Tool (We'll help you with this if you need support)

Tag Hosting (GTM, SFTP to web hosting, or we host for a small fee)

This is how the test logic will be delivered to the site

The test structure logic will be stored and delivered from Google Tag Manager, this ensures a fast delivery of your test structure to the visitors on your site.

There are a couple of alternatives to serving the test content via GTM and these are :

  • You copy and paste the logic into your Content Management Tool
  • We publish the test logic JavaScript via SFTP to your site.
  • For a small fee that covers the hosting and delivery costs we can host the test logic files for you

What you need to do

Add a small piece of Javascript provided by Google via their GTM tool to your site (We'll help you with this also if you need the support)

Google Analytics

This is how you'll measure the success of a test

Google Analytics allows you to report on things that happen on your website, like how many visitors view which pages, how far through your funnel visitors get and how many convert from browsers into buyers.

Free CRO Tool uses easily identifyable events that fire during tests to measure one version of a test (Control) against another (Challenger) so that you during testing you can measure the effect that the test is having on your visitors conversion rate to ensure that they align with your expected lift in conversion rate, this can be progression through your payment funnel, or increase news letter signup or any other goal that you may have for your test.

Apply for beta testing account

Free CRO Tool is under active development and is at the stage now where we need users out in the wild to use the tool and report back on things that need to be improved or don't quite work.