CRO Gurus

Many online shops are built on an assumption that more visitors means more sales. CRO Gurus argues the opposite for most Shopify stores: the problem is usually not traffic but what happens after the click. The agency has worked on conversion rate optimization since 2015, and it says it has helped more than two hundred Shopify stores, across a wide range of industries.

Why it starts after the first click

The agency compares a typical store to a leaky bucket, where adding more traffic only means more of it drains away. It points out that buying traffic gets harder and dearer each year, while improving a storefront has mostly fixed costs. Its advice is to optimize first and then spend more on traffic, because each extra visitor then returns more. It adds that this is the same approach investors take when they grow newly acquired online businesses, focusing on conversion, order value and purchase frequency rather than visits.

The three levers

The work is organized around three measures:

• Conversion: getting more of the existing visitors to buy, which the agency treats as the first goal because many stores lose a large share of people soon after they land.
• Average order value: testing upsells, cross-sells and bundles to find which ones suit a particular store, balancing conversion rates against the size of each purchase.
• Purchase frequency: turning buyers into repeat buyers.

The agency also does engineering work on the store itself, building it so that it can cope with growth. It argues that cheap work gets paid for twice, so it aims to remove technical debt by doing the job properly the first time and avoiding short-term tricks that break.

How an engagement runs

Work follows a three-step process. It starts with a discovery call about growth goals and expectations. The agency then carries out an in-depth analysis and builds a plan from data that serves as the base for later work. Finally it works through the priorities in order, beginning with the one it judges most important.

Each client is assigned a dedicated growth champion who handles communication, rather than being passed between juniors, and gets access to the same tools the agency uses so the use of the budget stays visible. The agency says it works best with brands that already have steady revenue and rely on analytics and continuous testing, and that clients need to lead the project on their side.