What Conversion Rate Optimization Costs

A monthly retainer buys continuous capacity: diagnosis, implementation, and measurement in an ongoing cycle. It fits conversion work well because the work compounds and because the measurement layer needs a permanent owner. Its weakness is that it can drift into activity without outcomes if nobody is holding it to a number.

Project pricing fits a defined scope — a tracking rebuild, a checkout overhaul — and is cleaner to buy. Its weakness is that conversion work reveals its next priority as it goes, so a fixed scope written in advance is frequently the wrong scope by week three.

Performance-based pricing sounds ideal and is usually structurally unworkable. Attribution disagreements are inevitable, the agency's incentive is to claim credit for lifts that came from elsewhere, and the arrangement discourages exactly the unglamorous infrastructure work — tracking rebuilds, performance fixes — that produces the largest durable gains. We do not offer it, and we are skeptical of firms that lead with it.

Two engagements at very different prices are usually different in scope rather than in quality. The variables that move it most:

Our engagements start at $3,000 per month. That covers ongoing conversion engineering: continued measurement ownership and regression monitoring, a diagnostic cycle that produces prioritized findings, implementation of the fixes in your codebase, and reporting against revenue rather than against activity.

Larger engagements scale with implementation volume rather than with meeting frequency. A store with a complex custom checkout, several domains, and a CRM integration requirement will run higher because there is more to build, not because there is more to discuss.

The initial conversion audit is free for qualified businesses. If we do not think we can find enough to justify the fee, we will tell you at that point rather than after the first invoice.

We turn down work regularly, and it is worth being explicit about when. If your site gets very little traffic, there is not enough signal to diagnose anything and your money is better spent on acquisition. If your problem is that the traffic is unqualified, conversion work on the site cannot fix a targeting problem. If your product does not sell for reasons unrelated to the funnel, no amount of instrumentation changes that.

The clear case for this work is a business already spending meaningfully on traffic, with a funnel nobody has audited, where a relative improvement in conversion rate is worth multiples of the fee. That describes most of the companies that come to us, but not all of them.