Articles · Growing what you have
What does a conversion rate optimisation agency do?
Published
Short version: it gets more revenue out of the visitors your store already has, instead of paying for more of them. The longer version is what the work actually looks like week to week, which is what this page is for.
The short version
You already paid for the traffic, whether that was an ad, an SEO ranking or a customer who simply typed your name in. Conversion rate optimisation, usually shortened to CRO, is the discipline of finding where your funnel loses those visitors before they buy, then testing a fix rather than guessing at one. A CRO agency runs that process for you: research, hypothesis, test, and a decision at the end that is either "ship it" or "kill it and try the next one."
What the work actually looks like
Most engagements run the same loop. First, research: session recordings, analytics funnels and sometimes direct user testing, to find where people hesitate or leave. Second, a hypothesis stated in a form that can actually be proven wrong: "shortening the checkout from three steps to two will reduce abandonment," not "the checkout feels clunky." Third, a test against a control, run until the result is statistically meaningful rather than until someone gets impatient. Fourth, a decision: ship the winner, or record what was learned and move to the next hypothesis. Then the loop starts again.
Where the leaks usually are
Every store is different, but the recurring places are the ones you would guess: mobile checkout friction, product pages that make a shopper hunt for shipping cost or delivery time, a cart that resets or confuses on a slow connection, and trust signals such as reviews, returns policy and security badges sitting somewhere a nervous first-time buyer will not see them. None of that is exotic. What separates a good CRO engagement from a bad one is testing which of them is actually costing your store money, rather than fixing all of them on a hunch and never finding out which change mattered.
How it differs from paid ads or SEO
Paid ads and SEO bring more visitors in. CRO does not touch the top of the funnel at all. It changes what happens to the visitors already arriving. That makes it the wrong first move for a store with thin traffic: optimising a trickle returns less than filling the top of the funnel first. It is the right move once traffic is steady and the conversion rate has stopped climbing on its own, because at that point buying more visitors just buys more of the same leak.
What good testing looks like
A test needs a large enough sample to trust the result, which is a function of your traffic and how big a difference you are looking for, not a fixed number of days. Calling a test early because the numbers look good, or running five changes at once and crediting the winner to whichever one you liked, both produce a result that will not repeat. The discipline is duller than the marketing around it: wait for the number to be real, then act on it.
Where we sit, honestly
We are Elms Agency, and we run conversion rate optimisation for ecommerce and Shopify stores. Before we test anything on a client store, we test it on our own: Powerlete and Fittr Nutrition are our own DTC brands, run on the same stack we build for clients, so a change we recommend to you has already made or cost us money first. If your traffic is steady and your conversion rate has plateaued, that is exactly the situation this is for. If your traffic is thin, we would rather tell you to put the budget into finding customers first.
Common questions
- What does CRO stand for?
- Conversion rate optimisation: the discipline of turning more of your existing visitors into buyers, rather than paying for more visitors. A CRO agency runs that discipline for you.
- How long does a CRO test need to run?
- Until it reaches a meaningful sample size, not until it hits a date on a calendar. A low-traffic store can take a month or more to get a reliable read on one change; a high-traffic store can settle it in days. Anyone who promises a fixed turnaround before seeing your numbers is guessing.
- What is a good conversion rate for an ecommerce store?
- There is no honest single number. It moves with average order value, traffic source and category: a considered £300 purchase and an impulse £15 one do not convert at the same rate, and neither does traffic from a branded search versus a cold ad. Treat any agency that quotes you an industry-average benchmark with more scepticism than confidence.
- Do I need a CRO agency, or can I run tests myself?
- You can run tests yourself with enough traffic and the discipline to let them finish properly. What an agency mainly buys you is having run this process on stores that were not their own, so they have already made the early mistakes elsewhere: stopping a test the moment it looks good, testing five things at once, or treating a plausible-sounding hypothesis as a proven one.
- Is a conversion rate optimization agency the same as a conversion rate optimisation company?
- Same discipline, different spelling. A conversion rate optimization agency and a conversion rate optimisation company do identical work; the word choice is just which side of the Atlantic wrote the brief. We work with US and UK brands under either spelling.
- What do conversion rate optimization services actually include?
- Research, a testing plan, and running the tests properly rather than eyeballing a dashboard for two weeks. Conversion optimisation agency work and conversion optimization agency work mean the same thing here: the audit, the hypothesis, and the discipline to wait for a real result.
- Do you work with a conversion rate optimisation agency UK brands already use, or only new clients?
- Both. Some conversion rate optimisation agencies get brought in to review an existing testing programme rather than start one from scratch, and that is a shorter, cheaper engagement than people expect.
- How do you compare against other conversion rate optimisation companies, or a conversion rate optimization company?
- We would rather you asked what we last shipped than take our word for it. Most conversion rate optimisation service quotes read identically on paper; the difference only shows in whether the agency can build the fix or can only recommend it.
Get in touch
Tell us about your store or your business and we'll reply personally. No wizard, no ten questions.
Stores we build and grow
