Hiring a CRO agency: 12 *Key* Considerations (and Expert Advice)

Only 22% of eCommerce businesses are happy with their conversion rates. And CRO, when effectively,  directly impacts your conversions, sales and profit margins.

The wrong company, the wrong tools and the wrong analysis often send eCommerce brands spiralling down a rabbithole. 

This post answers all the questions you had about choosing the best conversion rate optimization firm for your business. You’ll know which services to choose based on your conversion optimization goals, what budget to set aside, and—most importantly—what questions to ask before zeroing in on a conversion optimization agency. 

What is a CRO agency?

A CRO agency works with a team of conversion optimization experts to solve your eCommerce CRO problems, often including:

• Project managers who’ll handle the end-to-end CRO process and own the results 
• Data analysts who’ll uncover conversions gaps in your eCommerce website
• Developers who’ll implement codes to optimize your website user experience
• Designers and copywriters who’ll make your website look and read attractive and compelling
• Quality analysts who’ll do a bit of everything but mostly ensure that all campaigns deployed are top-notch

What eCommerce business problems can CRO agencies solve? 

The top eCommerce brands spend 5% of their budget on CRO. Most eCommerce businesses face some common issues such as low conversion rates, cart abandonment, and low checkout rates. Only the ones which allocate a considerable budget to conversion optimization achieve the best results (an ROI of 223%). 

Some of the most pressing problems that eCommerce brands come to us with include:

Low conversion rates

You’re seeing a lot of success in customer acquisition but when it comes to converting them, you don’t see much ROI from your efforts. 

A conversion rate of below 5% means you’re losing out on sales that can bring in profits. 

This is often a complex area where most eCommerce businesses lack expertise. Some get stuck in the analytics and data gathering part of it as well. 

Low website traffic

Ads are expensive and you can’t resort to them all the time. That leaves organic, but most organic strategies are oversaturated. So you need to work around them smartly. 

This is the legwork and brainwork CRO agencies can help you with.

Low testing bandwidth

When you’re starting out, you may be very excited about carrying out a lot of testing on your website. However, mostly it dissipates with time. This happens because of many reasons such as limited CRO expertise and lack of time, resources. 

However, a key to landing successful conversions is increasing the velocity of testing and a CRO agency can help with that.  Alongside, they’ll also help you choose the type of test(s) that’ll work the best for your business’ emergent needs. 

12 Critical Questions to Ask a CRO Agency

#1 What services do you offer?

No matter what the specialization, a dependable CRO agency should at least be able to help you with the following:

✔ Funnel analytics

An effective CRO agency will not only help you figure out the average customer journey but will also bring light to complexities and what kind of attribution would give you the most crucial insights. 

They will not only enable you to understand the customer journey map better but also build a conversion funnel based on past visitor behavior, level of intent and predictive analytics about future behavior.

✔ Heatmaps 

Along with clicktracking, heatmaps can reveal to eCommerce businesses how their webpages are performing. From time spent on a particular area to scroll depth, heatmaps can reveal what’s working well with a website’s UX and what needs to be prioritized immediately for better conversions. When it comes to heatmaps and clicktracking, you need a CRO agency that actively segments by visitor, device, traffic type to identify patterns.

✔ Visitor recording insights

A good CRO agency won’t just cull out visitor recording data and offer it to you—they’ll also actively help you see patterns in behavior as revealed by that data and generate surveys & feedback forms that can further help in your optimization process. The idea is to choose an agency that depends the least on third-party tools and instead, rely on in-house tech that makes it easy to integrate all the data & related findings. 

✔ Audience research

With the user behavior feedback you gather, the CRO agency should be able to help you discover key audience segments that would be interested in your products. If they’re able to back this up with ample background research, nothing like it. This will make them capable to help you conduct segmented testing, which in turn will support your UX improvement efforts. 

✔ UX improvements

Segmented or multivariate testing will reveal the impact of a potential UX improvement when applied. This will enable any eCommerce business to assess what layouts, sections, content and CTAs will offer the most optimal experience to shoppers for them to convert quicker. 

Further Reading: The Founder's Guide to Customer Journey Map (eCommerce)

#2 What is your USP?

Now once you’ve answered #1, it’s time to build on it. 

There are 2 ways to understand if an agency can support you in the way(s) you need:

✓ Identify how the agency differentiates itself 

Specifically focus on their proprietary methodologies, tools they use, industries they’ve served and metrics they’ve helped improve. 

✓ Check if their claims hold ground 

For example, if you run a health supplement brand, see if you can get the agency to connect you with another brand they’ve worked with in the same industry. 

Caveat: Beware of the ones that target too broad an audience or try to do a bit of everything—unless they can perform at scale, they will underperform on their given word. 

Pro Tip: It’s best to seek companies that have a specialty they focus on—A/B testing, email marketing, etc. 

The differentiators will often lie in processes, expertise, and costs.

#3 Have you worked across a number of industries?

Considering a host of agencies (including SEO, media and digital) are trying to offer conversion rate optimization services, as an eComm business, you’ll have to be all the more sure about the agency you’re picking. 

Put simply, choose an agency that has documented proof of working with varied industries. 

The more a CRO agency has experience working with brands across industries, the more they’ll have an intuitive understanding of how customers behave, what they want from their shopping journeys and why they’d prefer this over that to checkout faster. 

What does a proper CRO agency do? It’ll help you answer more specific questions like:

✔ What unique challenges did you face in each industry and what insight did you discover?

✔ How do you tailor conversion strategies when switching between industries on a day-to-day basis?

Further Reading: Why Is Your Conversion Rate Low: Possible Causes + Solutions

#4 What is the CRO process you follow for your business?

To evaluate how good a CRO agency will work for you, will depend on:

✔ How they go about their discovery and research (to understand business needs, goals and audiences)

✔ How they prioritize test hypotheses (and use these to run statistically significant tests)

✔ How they measure the success of their experiments (and this includes how they draw insights from failed tests)

A strong CRO process involves quantitative and qualitative research.

Quantitative data helps understand what actions customers are taking on your website, which pages are not performing well, which parts of your website are leaking visitors etc.

Conversion rate optimization software or tools that include high-level analytics can help collect this type of customer behavioral data. When choosing a CRO agency, make sure you go for the ones that delve into deeper metrics—beyond just exit or bounce rates—such as:

• Data segmentation
• Funnel management
• Heatmap analysis

Qualitative data helps you go deeper and understand what motivates customers to take actions and the reason why some things are working and some aren’t. It offers you the hypotheses to carry out the A/B and multivariate tests against. 

The best conversion rate optimization agencies will spend some effort on conducting user research. 

The top conversion agencies conduct user research in a number of ways:

• Online surveys
• Individual interviews
• Exit surveys
• Jobs-to-be-done interviews 

#5 Do you have a team that can tolerate project complexity?

The top-tier CRO agencies usually divide their clients into groups within their teams. Each group handles a specific number of clients, say 2–3.

A related question is how much time the agency will spend on your specific project. Usually, CRO projects take up a lot of time. This is because there are many resources and processes involved.

The next step is to find out how they’ve handled project complexities in the past. This could include anything from optimizing for diverse customer journeys to handling diverse product catalogs with thousands of SKUs. 

The final piece in the equation is to figure how good they’re at strategic thinking to be able to work through diverse challenges including tech stack misalignments and running tests during high traffic times. 

Further Reading: 33 Founders/Industry Experts share eCommerce CRO Best Practices

#6 What communication channels will be open?

No matter how many communication channels a CRO agency says it has, look for exchanges specialy for critical updates, collaboration tools & ideas, regular reporting and overall documentation:

Discovery: The first interaction will need to throw light on where your eCommerce business is ATM, what conversion challenges you’re facing and if the agency can offer the right interventions. The salesperson should go beyond mere success stories and focus on site criteria such as if the site traffic meets the testing needs and what kind of an audit would help deepen the discovery. 

Process: This will be a result of an agreement between the agency and the eCommerce business around the number of tests to be performed, how many pages will need optimization etc. Depending on these, the agency should be able to give you a clear roadmap.

Check-ins: These will ensure the process and progress stay on-track - to share emerging insights from data, offer feedback and suggest any changes to planned tests if required. 

#7 What costs will I need to bear?

You’d have an idea about the cost to hire any agency from the FAQ section. Apart from that, you’ll also need to determine the software costs to launch tests. 

Typically, CRO agencies can be hired either on a per-hour rate or per project basis - from our experience, the per-hour framework is best applied when the exact scope of work isn’t known. 

The per project basis of billing often drills down to a retainer model of billing - this can make more sense if an eCommerce brand wants to run multiple tests across several months and are in a more mature stage of applying CRO. 

Similarly, it’s also a good idea to find out through a site audit how many tests you’ll realistically need at the moment, so that if needed, your agency can also charge you per test. 

Caveat: The most trustworthy CRO agencies may not say yes to a project even if you can pay in case you don’t have the traffic that makes multivariate testing a success in the moderately long run. 

#8 What results can I expect from you?

Ask them if they can guarantee an increase in your conversion rates. The best conversion rate optimization agencies will never guarantee a fixed increase in conversion rates. 

Because there are usually fluctuating factors. For example, organic traffic directly affects conversion rate. The quality of traffic coming to your site isn’t something the agency can control. Moreover, they can also not predict external factors such as a competitor campaign affecting your conversion rate. 

There can only be 2 types of agencies that guarantee increases in conversion rate: 

• Those who are making false promises
• Those who define an increase in terms of the success of a specific test

You should stay away from both of them. 

Finally, you should check how they determine the success of a project. Generally, the success of conversion projects are dependent on:

• The percentage of successful tests
• The process used to achieve the outcome
• The analysis the team obtains from the tests and the data
• The success of the changes applied through the various tests

Further Reading: 153 A/B Testing Ideas for eCommerce (Homepage, PDP, Cart, Checkout)

#9 How would you determine which pages to optimize?

There are many aspects to eCommerce site page optimization: analysis, developing a testing framework, implementing the framework, and measuring the results. This can easily take up around 2–4 weeks. 

Since it takes up a lot of effort to test and develop a page, it’s important to choose the right pages. 

The best agencies have a fixed process for page optimization that includes user research, qualitative analysis, competitive analysis, usability testing, jobs-to-be-done interviews, etc.

As a practice, an effective CRO agency will be able to lead your optimization efforts by identifying:

✔ Pages with high traffic but low conversions

✔ Pages that will bring in significantly more revenue (even with a small optimization tweak)

✔ Pages that show up user behavior problems (like rage clicks and more back button use)

✔  Pages that frequently appear in customer complaints & reviews

#10 How would you determine what changes to make on each page? 

It can be helpful to request a demo of how the agencies carry out their process—before moving ahead. This will mostly be based on customer data which will determine what sort of tests to run & optimize.

Unsure of how this can play out in real-time? Here are a few key instances that you can expect a conversion rate optimization agency to address:

✔ A high exit rate on product pages → Move the most critical product info above the fold

✔ Low filter usage on category pages → Retain the most used attributes & show selected attributes together

✔ Low clicks on homepage hero header → Sharpen the copy around value proposition & show social proof

#11 How many experiments will you conduct every month?

It’s common knowledge that the more tests conducted, the more chances of an increase in conversion rate. However, that shouldn’t be the determining factor for choosing tests. 

Conducting extra tests can be counterproductive. This is because exposing your site traffic to more than one experiment at the same time can make it difficult for you to figure out what worked and what didn’t. 

To conclude on how many experiments to run every month, consider:

✔ Traffic volume: On an average, every variation needs at least 1000-2000 visitors to achieve statistical significance, which means if you have lower traffic, you can do with lesser tests

✔ Test duration requirements: Most A/B testing experiments need about 4 weeks to draw insights and conclusions from, since many factors contribute to changes including buying patterns, seasonal fluctuations etc.

✔ Existing conversion rate: It’s a fact that a lower conversion rate needs more visitors to reach statistical significance, which means if you have 1% conversion rate as against 5%, you may have to wait a while to run concurrent tests successfully

#12 What is your process for mobile optimization?

Mobile responsive websites are critical to conversion success today. It’s important for your business to note the percentage of visitors coming to your website and your mobile conversion rate as compared to desktop ones. 

Mobile optimization processes are quite different from desktop ones. Since most of the customers on mobile fall either in the consideration or the purchase stage, you’ll need to customize your site to match each group’s intent.

It’s best to request a mobile optimization process demo from the CRO agencies you’re considering. 

Further Reading: 30 Mobile Optimization Tips For eCommerce (+ Examples)

eCommerce business owners also want to know:

1. Which type of CRO service is right for my business?

While planning to avail of conversion rate optimization services, you may find different types of conversion optimization agencies offering them. 

Here’s a chart showing the various types and the pros and cons for each to help you choose: 

2. Which conversion rate optimization service is right for my budget?

Affordability and Value are the two critical components that decide how great a financial fit a CRO agency will be for a specific eCommerce business. 

If you can’t afford it, it doesn’t matter how much of a value it has. Again, if you can afford it, you won’t choose it unless it offers a certain value. 

So while some CRO experts will charge less, they may offer lesser value. While there may be some big CRO agencies that may cost a bomb but provide services that others simply can’t.

a) Cost of hiring CRO agencies

Now that this is cleared up, here’s a breakdown of what different CRO agencies charge for their services: 

Next, let’s move on to what you need to pay for. Every CRO project almost always has these costs:

• The cost of human resources - Most CRO agencies have some or all of these experts on their team: project managers, data analysts, developers, designers, copywriters, and quality analysts. In some cases, agencies may have some of these roles outsourced or one team member taking on multiple roles. In the case of freelancers too, one person may carry out multiple functions. 
• The cost of software to be used in the project - This will include the cost for A/B testing software, session recording tools, email marketing tools, personalization tools, etc. 
• The cost of carrying out A/B tests - This mostly includes the cost of designing and developing the changes required on your eCommerce website. Each A/B test project can—on average—require about 1–10 hours of development work. This depends purely on the complexity of the performing experiments. Top-tier CRO firms handle all aspects of A/B tests for their clients. This helps them execute A/B testing projects at scale and take ownership of outcomes. 
• The cost of implementing the winning strategies - This involves the cost of replacing the old design elements with the new design elements. 

b) Cost of hiring digital marketing agencies

In the last 4–5 years, multiple digital marketing agencies have cropped up offering conversion marketing services. 

Your success with results will solely depend on how much of an investment these agencies make in CRO.

Upfront, the cost of hiring a digital marketing agency for CRO services will be around $4,000–$35,000 per month, depending on the scope of work and the scale at which your eCommerce store is running. 

c) Cost of hiring a freelancer offering conversion optimization services

The costs can range widely. It can be as low as $10–$40 per hour and as high as $170–$230 per hour.

Consider hiring: A freelancer only and only if you’re at the very early stages of doing conversion rate optimization experiments. The other reason why some eCommerce businesses choose a freelancer over a full-fledged unit is because they exactly know the experiment they need to run and if it especially represents a narrow aspect of their overall conversion efforts. 

You must read: 10 Questions to Ask When Hiring An eCommerce Email Marketing Agency

3. CRO Tools vs CRO Agency: Which one to go for and when?

Many eCommerce businesses like yours get stuck at this decision-making phase: to hire a conversion rate optimization agency or getting CRO tools and doing the manual work in-house. 

Okay so let’s get to the CRO tools first. 

a) What CRO tools should you be using? 

To carry out any successful conversion optimization project, you’ll need tools from these 3 categories:

• Web analytics
• User behavior tools
• A/B testing tools

In case you don’t want to spend a lot on individual tools, you can use a conversion optimization tool suite that contains multiple tools under one umbrella. 

b) When should you be using CRO tools?

Conversion optimization tools are most effective when your business goals are to:

• Evaluate the performance of your eCommerce funnel
• Identify what’s blocking conversions on your eCommerce site
• Identify optimizations required to convert more visitors into customers
• Identify optimizations to record the highest conversion rates

In the end, tools are the means to obtain results. It can never directly give you results unless you know what you are using them for. This is where a targeted and well-structured conversion rate optimization strategy comes into the picture.  

Further Reading: 5 Stages of an eCommerce Conversion Funnel (+ Examples)

c) When should you hire a CRO agency?

It’s easy to believe that you can carry out conversion optimization experiments simply by reading resources on the internet. 

But nothing can be further from the truth. If you’re serious about getting the desired results for your eCommerce business, you’d want to hire the best conversion optimization experts out there. 

You’ll need to hire a CRO agency when you’re expecting the following results:

• Consistent traffic/conversions - This is important for your overall CRO performance. This is because higher traffic improves your chances of successful A/B testing. Higher website traffic makes it easier to test variations and find a statistical significance. For example, 10,000 visitors per month have a higher statistical significance than 1000 visitors per month
• Faster results - The expertise of CRO agencies comes from carrying out a huge volume of tests. This means they can run tests faster and achieve higher quality results. Training an in-house team to achieve the results may take up a lot of time and resources. 
• Full-proof CRO strategy - Conversion rate optimization is a scientific process where you optimize your website to ensure visitors perform specific actions. For this to play out, you need a well-defined process to avoid wastage of time and resources. Since CRO agencies work with multiple clients, they have the expertise to carry out conversion optimization projects as per your business requirements. 
• Lower overall expenditure - Dishing out the salary of an entire CRO team of project managers, designers, developers, and copywriters will create a huge dent in your pocket. A smarter option is to hire conversion optimization services from an agency. 
• Train your in-house team - You can both boost your site conversions as well as train your team in the process. CRO training can work for both your marketing as well as your development teams. Even your analysts will have a lot of scope to learn. 

Comprehensive Conversion Optimization—that’s Convertcart for you 

In the world out there, most eCommerce businesses struggle with disparate tests, without achieving unified insights that they can put to use. 

In here, we make it easier everyday for our clients with a comprehensive suite of CRO tools, CRO360. 

It combines 16 different tools within the same platform and works with more than 80 different ways to segment customers better, faster. 

Curious to find out how it works? 

Request a free audit today!