#13 – What's The Cost Of Hiring A Conversion Optimization Agency?

My name is Khalil Slade and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like it's no big deal.

While pretty much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we will talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh man. I bring tough questions like do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are, but we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live hour podcast today wherever you listen to your podcasts.

What's the cost of hiring a CRO agent? I think may the person who asked this question may be like a potential client. I'm not sure.

You can hire a CRO agency for as little as $2,000 a month and you can hire a CRO agency for as much as 30 and $40,000 a month. I can assure you one thing. What you get out of a $2,000 company is a lot different than like $30,000 company. Two completely different animals. It depends on on what you are looking for. And let's talk about different levels of hiring as conversion optimization or experimentation company. There are some companies that will come in and do a turnkey solution. I'm going to figure out the problems. I'm going to do the ideation to figure out solutions to those problems. I'm going to create the design, I'm going to handle the implementation, the quality control. I'm going to roll out the experiments, I'm going to monitor the results and I'm going to make a recommendation. That is a lot of work and depends of course on how many experiments I'm running in a month. If I'm running a single experiment per month, it's a lot different than if I'm running four or five experiments per month. The smaller agencies usually will charge, I would say any between 4 to $5,000 a month. Successful agencies probably like you know, spending 10,000, $11,000 a month and can go up from there. Digital marketing agencies play this game. We all Know it, but we don't talk about it. We don't like to share the number of hours that we put into a project. The idea there is, oh, let me try and do as little work as possible, hopefully produce amazing results and hopefully charge my clients a lot of money. Maybe I can charge my clients $7,000 a month. I do 10 hours worth of work and just hope that those 10 hours work are going to produce some massive amazing results. The client is happy and my hourly rate is 700,000 hour and everybody's happy. That works in some strategic campaigns and some strategic work. Most of the digital marketing work requires a lot of effort. Think about this, Simba. How long does it take you to produce a piece of content? Like, you know, a good piece of content that you're proud of? 30 to 40 hours, correct?

Yeah.

If you're able. Let's say somebody comes and hires you and you say, I'm going to write you four pieces of content in a month and I want to charge you. Let's throw on them. I want to charge $10,000, my friend. It sounds good. Now take this scenario. If you're doing 100 hours to produce those effectively, your hourly rate is $100 an hour. If you're able to produce the same pieces of content in 10 hours, your hourly rate now is $1,000 an hour. There's a huge difference between the two. Can you actually produce four amazing pieces of content in 10 hours? Is that even doable in 10 hours? There you go. And that's what I think the trick when it comes to conversion optimization. Conversion optimization is labor intensive. There's a lot of work that to it. There's the analysis, the ideation, the design, the implementation, the quality control. I can't imagine somebody doing a conversion optimization project in less than 40 or 50 hours a month. With most of the companies that we work with, we are doing anywhere between 70 to 100 hours. And that's kind of on the low end of things. Sometimes we're doing 200 hours a month. You want to understand what the hourly rate is and you want to understand what kind of output you are getting. It's important to see two things. One is, okay, the effort that's getting put and the output that's getting put. And then you also want to look at the results. Two companies Both can charge $1,000 a month, but the output that you're getting is completely different. One company is producing four or five experiments a month. Another company is producing one experiment per month. And even like comparing experiments by the way to experiments is not comparing apples to apples, because one experiment could be a lot more complex than the four experiments. So you want to kind of drill a bit deeper to understand what you are signing up for, what you are getting, what's the final output, what's the track record, what's the history. There's just so much there that you want to think about when you're hiring a CRO agency.