Hire a CRO Specialist Who Can Also Ship the Fix
A CRO specialist works out why your funnel loses the people it loses and turns that into a prioritised, testable plan. Hiring one who cannot build changes what you get: recommendations costed by somebody who will never have to implement them, and a roadmap that stalls at the first expensive item. We do the research and the build, so the plan you receive is one that can actually happen.
CRO strategy, design and development across Shopify, WordPress, Convert, Optimizely, VWO and Adobe Target.
What a CRO specialist is accountable for
Eight things, and the last one is the one most hires are weakest at.
Quantitative diagnosis
Reading a funnel in GA4 well enough to know which drop-off is a problem and which is just how that step behaves, and spotting when the instrumentation itself is the reason the numbers look strange.
Behavioural analysis
Watching recorded sessions and heatmaps with a question in mind rather than browsing them. The skill is knowing which forty sessions to watch, not watching four hundred.
Customer research
Designing on-site and post-purchase questions that produce usable answers, and mining sales calls, support tickets and reviews for the objection that keeps recurring.
Heuristic and UX evaluation
A structured walk of the conversion path on real devices, against conversion and usability principles, producing findings rather than opinions.
Hypothesis and experiment design
Turning a finding into something falsifiable, deciding what the treatment actually says, and knowing when a change is a defect that should simply be fixed rather than tested.
Prioritisation that survives contact with a budget
Ordering a roadmap on expected impact, confidence in the evidence and effort — and being able to defend that order when somebody senior wants their idea first.
Programme management
Keeping a cadence: what is live, what is queued, what a result meant, and what the next round changed about the plan. Most programmes die from drift, not from bad ideas.
Statistical literacy
Sample size, run length, guardrail metrics, sample ratio mismatch, and the discipline not to call a result early. Knowing when a number does not mean what it appears to mean is the whole job.
Which of the two roles do you actually need?
These are different hires and the wrong one is an expensive six months. This table is meant to send you to the other page if that is the right answer.
| Dimension | CRO specialist | CRO developer |
|---|---|---|
| Primary output | Evidence, hypotheses and a prioritised roadmap. | Working experiments, pages and production code. |
| The question they answer | “What should we change, and how would we know it worked?” | “How do we build this correctly and measure it?” |
| Typical first week | In your analytics, your recordings and your customer conversations. | In your DOM, your theme and your experimentation platform. |
| You need one when | You have traffic and no explanation for the conversion rate. | You have a backlog of things to build and no capacity. |
| Fails without | Access to data and permission to change things. | A clear hypothesis and a defined design. |
| The other one is a better hire if | Your research is solid and the constraint is delivery. | You already know how to build it and not what to build. |
If the right column describes your problem, go to hire a CRO developer instead — it is a different page for a different job and it will answer your questions faster than this one.
What to screen for, and what we bring
Research and analysis
- GA4: explorations, segments, funnel and path reports
- Google Tag Manager and event integrity review
- Session recording and heatmap tools
- On-site and post-purchase survey design
- Qualitative analysis of support, sales and review data
Experimentation
- Hypothesis and experiment design
- Sample-size and run-length arithmetic
- Prioritisation frameworks, used as a tool rather than a ritual
- Guardrail metrics and result interpretation
- Convert Experiences, Optimizely, VWO and Adobe Target
Conversion craft
- Conversion copywriting
- Information architecture and user flows
- Wireframing and treatment specification
- Offer and message-match analysis for paid traffic
- Accessibility and usability heuristics
Commercial context
- Ecommerce funnels on Shopify and Shopify Plus
- Lead-generation and B2B funnels
- Working alongside paid media and lifecycle teams
- Presenting results to people who did not commission the test
- Knowing the technical cost of a recommendation before making it
The first weeks, in order
Each step decides where the next one looks, which is why the order matters more than the length of any one of them.
- 1
Scope and access
Which funnels are in scope, what access is needed, and what the first four weeks will produce. Written down before anyone starts.
- 2
Diagnose
Analytics, instrumentation review, recordings and customer research, in that order, because each one decides where the next should look.
- 3
Audit and prioritise
Findings written individually with their evidence, costed against your real stack, and ordered on impact, confidence and effort.
- 4
Design the experiments
Hypotheses that can be falsified, treatments specified in enough detail to be built, and a decision per item on test-or-fix.
- 5
Run the programme
Keep the cadence, read the results properly, write down what each round meant, and re-order the roadmap on what was learned.
Who this is for
Ecommerce brands
You have steady traffic, a conversion rate nobody can explain, and no in-house CRO function to explain it.
Full-service CROMarketing and growth teams
Someone needs to own conversion as a discipline rather than as an occasional project between campaigns.
CRO auditAgencies without a CRO lead
You sell conversion work and need a specialist behind it, white-label, without carrying the salary between engagements.
White-label supportWho this is not for
- Teams who already have research they trust and need it built — hire a CRO developer
- Businesses whose real constraint is the product, the price or delivery. Conversion work will not rescue an offer the market has rejected, and we will say so before taking the engagement
- Anyone who wants a specialist to validate a decision that has already been made
- Sites still being rebuilt. Optimise what will exist, not what is about to be replaced
Ways to work together
The commercial shape is chosen after we know the scope, not before.
Dedicated partnership
Reserved monthly capacity, running the programme continuously. Best when there is a real pipeline to run.
Flexible hours
Allocated specialist time drawn down as questions arise. Best when you have some internal capability and need it topped up.
Project engagement
A defined scope — usually an audit and a roadmap — with agreed deliverables and a timeline.
We do not publish rates: cost is driven by scope and by the state of your site, and a rate without scope would be misleading. All three shapes are described under engagement models.
Questions people ask before hiring
Where to go next
Further reading
Discuss Your Goals
Tell us what the funnel is doing and what you have already tried. We will come back with what we would look at first and how the engagement would run.