Should You Hire A Conversion Agency Or Do It In-House?

We work with dozens of companies on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to help them with their split testing and optimization efforts and we talk to dozens more each month.  One major question that always comes up is… “Why can’t I just hire this in house instead of hiring a company to do it?”

I thought I would shed some light on the topic and tell me if you agree.

First is conversion rate optimization is both an art and a science.  There is much more to it than getting a list of split test ideas and setting up some basic tests.  At least if you want to do it effectively.

Sure you can just test some random ideas in hopes that you will see some improvement but you won’t always know why things are improving or not and you definitely won’t get smarter as a company by following this method.

Best practices? They will only take you so far…  What works for one company won’t necessarily work for you.

To effectively test you need to follow a process which is typically much more work than just one person can handle.  I can’t count how many times we hear from a company that they just hired a person to do their testing in house and a couple months later they come back to us because it simply wasn’t getting done.

Hypothesis creation, wireframes, design, development, reporting, analysis and more… Then have the knowledge and experience to direct the test plan in the best direction for maximum results.

Sure you may have development resources, designers, project managers and others on staff but how many other projects and tasks do they have on their plate that will become more of a priority than optimization?  Given optimization is the only true way to get and keep a competitive advantage it should be a major priority.

Plus your developer may not even understand testing methodology which can cause issues as well.  You need developers that actually understand and can deploy the tests correctly and efficiently.  We learned this the hard way.

Way too much for just one person.  We know as we do this every day.

To effectively do conversion rate optimization you need to staff up and that is going to cost you…

Recruiter $60,000.00
Team CRO Training $20,000.00
Optimization Manager $60,000.00
UX Designer $48,000.00
Graphic Designer $42,000.00
Optimizely/VWO/Convert Certified Developers $60,000.00
Reporting Manager $35,000.00
Data Scientist $100,000.00
Total $425,000.00

Of course the costs vary a little but you get the idea. It isn’t cheap.

Or you can hire a company with the knowledge, expertise and capabilities for basically less than the cost of one good developer.

As Perry Marshall said, “Testing correctly can lead you to exponential growth.”

We have seen this time and time again.  While you feel it may be best to do it on your own, the upside just isn’t worth the risk and cost associated with doing it the right way.

Want to see just how much conversion optimization can do for your business? Request your complimentary analysis today.