What does a conversion rate optimization agency do?

A conversion rate optimization (CRO) agency helps an online store turn more of its visitors into customers. For a Shopify store, that usually means finding where shoppers drop off between the first page and checkout, proposing changes and measuring whether they worked. What an agency hands you, and how much of it reaches your live store, varies from one engagement to the next.

What a conversion rate optimization agency usually does

Most engagements follow the same arc, roughly in this order:

• Research. The agency studies your store, your analytics and how your customers behave. Some add research of their own, such as customer interviews, surveys and usability studies.
• An audit. The findings come back as a list of problems on your pages, from the homepage to the cart.
• A roadmap. The findings are ranked into a plan, usually by a consultant’s estimate.
• Changes. Some agencies build the changes, often with development billed extra; others hand the task list to your developer.
• Testing. A change that gets built can be tested against the original, so you know whether it worked.
• Reporting. Results usually come back in a regular report, often a monthly slide deck.

Where the work usually stops

The analysis is often sharp, and the problems an audit names are usually real. The catch is where the engagement ends. An audit describes opportunities; it doesn’t change your store. The value arrives only when a fix is live and its impact is measured, and getting it live is often left to your team.

That last step is where many findings stall. As we wrote in “Why most conversion rate optimization audits never ship,” recommendations tend to arrive unpriced and pass through too many handoffs, so they often lose the fight for developer time.

How an agency is paid

Agencies usually bill for their time and expertise, through a retainer or a project fee. Before you sign, ask what the fee buys: findings delivered, or fixes live on your store with their impact measured.

When an agency is the right choice

• You need brand strategy. Positioning, messaging and creative direction are judgment calls about who the store is for, and a different job from fixing a leaking product page.
• You need original research. Customer interviews, surveys and usability studies reveal things your store data can’t.
• Your team already has developer capacity. If your developers have room in their sprints, an agency’s roadmap has somewhere to go.

Software that does the same job

HI Engine is software that runs the loop a CRO agency is hired for: it finds what’s costing your Shopify store conversions, sizes each issue in $/month, writes the fix into your theme and tests it against a control. Nothing goes live without your approval.

To see what it would find first, the free audit gives you three conversion rate optimization ideas for your store, grounded in a real mobile walk of your homepage, collection, product page and cart.

In the 14-day free trial, we ship your first 3 fixes in the first month. You pay only after they’re live and you’ve seen the results.