Every R1 you pay for ads has the same job: bring a shopper. Whether they buy is up to your site — and most SA stores leave 30–60% of revenue on the table at the conversion step. We run a disciplined CRO programme: audit, hypothesis, A/B test, learn — every month, on your store.
CRO became a buzzword and now every agency offers it. Most do it badly. Here are the four patterns that turn it into expensive theatre.
"Move the CTA above the fold." "Make the button orange." "Add urgency." These are not experiments — they're someone else's results applied to your store with no idea why they worked for them. Sometimes they win. Mostly they don't move the metric, or they win for the wrong reason.
"It's been running 4 days and the variant is up 18% — let's call it and roll it out." A week later the lift disappears, or worse, reverses. The agency moves on. Half the "wins" in CRO portfolios are noise that was rolled out before the test ended.
If 92% of shoppers drop at "Add to cart → Checkout", testing hero-headline copy is a waste of effort. CRO without funnel diagnostics tests where it's easy, not where it matters. The biggest gain is almost always at the worst-converting step.
GA tells you what happened. It never tells you why. Without session replays, on-site surveys, post-purchase questions, and 1:1 user tests, you're guessing at hypotheses. Quant + qual together produce hypotheses that win 40-60% of the time. Quant alone gets 15%.
This loop runs continuously — not once. Each cycle compounds on the last because we keep the learnings and the data.
Funnel diagnostics, quant + qual, find the worst-converting step.
"Because X is happening, if we Y we expect Z lift." Specific. Testable.
Variant designed, instrumented, sample size calculated up-front.
A/B test runs to statistical significance — no early calls, no early kills.
Document the result + the reason. Roll out winners. Library the loss.
Before we run a single test we score your store across 8 conversion-relevant areas. The lowest-scoring areas become the first month's experiment queue.
Most CRO engagements waste month one "ramping up". Ours doesn't. We arrive with a 60-point audit framework, run it inside 5 working days, and present you with a ranked list of opportunities — each tagged with effort, confidence, and projected uplift.
You see what's broken, why it matters, and what we'd test first. You can stop the engagement after the audit if you want — most clients don't.
Example scorecard from a recent SA fashion retailer — anonymised.
You can't optimise what you can't see. Every engagement begins by instrumenting your store with the four lenses below — three weeks in, you have more visibility than most agencies achieve in a year.
GA4 + server-side tracking (Meta CAPI, GA4 Measurement Protocol), funnel events, custom dimensions, deduped attribution.
Real shopper sessions on video — watch the moments people get stuck, rage-click, or bail. The single highest-ROI tool in CRO.
On-site polls, exit-intent surveys, post-purchase questions ("what almost stopped you?"), 1:1 user testing.
Server-side or client-side experiments depending on your stack and traffic. Sample sizes calculated up-front. No early calls.
Click maps, scroll maps, attention maps. Identify dead zones, ignored CTAs, and unexpected interactions.
Real-user Core Web Vitals tracking by page-type, device, and country. Slow pages are conversion killers.
Centralised, governed tagging — server-side GTM where possible, consent-aware, with versioning + rollback.
Abandoned-cart, browse-abandon, win-back, post-purchase email + SMS + WhatsApp flows wired to your CRO experiments.
Every store is different — but certain patterns lift conversion across most SA e-commerce categories. These are the experiments we'd queue up first, with the typical lift band we observe.
Mobile-first persistent bar on product pages — keeps "Add to cart" reachable as shoppers scroll the gallery and read reviews.
Shop Pay / Apple Pay / Google Pay above the cart line — bypasses 80% of the form for returning shoppers. Single biggest mobile-only win.
Star rating + count near the price, not buried below variant pickers. Trust must precede the decision, not follow it.
"Order in the next 2h 14min and get it Wed 12 Mar". Removes the #1 SA shopper anxiety — "when will it actually arrive?"
"Free returns within 14 days" pill near the buy button. Removes the second-biggest SA shopper anxiety — "can I send it back?"
Payflex, Mobicred, Float — surfaced on PDP and at checkout. Particularly strong on AOV over R1 500.
"Question about this product? WhatsApp us." Visible button → real human. SA shoppers prefer WhatsApp over chat-bot widgets.
Google Places autocomplete at the address step — cuts the most frustrating typing on mobile and avoids "address not found" errors.
For cart-abandoners with email captured — a 3-message sequence over 24h, mostly recovers AOV-loss-equivalents within the first 6 hours.
CRO retainers can be vague — ours are not. Here's exactly what shows up in your inbox every month.
Drop-off by step, by device, by traffic source, by product category. Highlights the top 3 leak points and the projected revenue at stake.
Ranked list of hypotheses for the next 6 weeks — each with effort, confidence, projected uplift, and the page/segment it targets.
Variants designed, copywritten, built, instrumented, and shipped behind a feature flag. We handle the dev work; you don't queue engineering.
Every experiment ends with a written report — outcome, statistical confidence, lift, learnings, recommendation to roll out / iterate / shelve.
Every win, every loss, the reason it moved the metric — stored in a shared Notion workspace so the learnings compound over years.
30-min weekly call with your team — experiment status, blockers, next-cycle prioritisation. Slack channel in between for fast questions.
Each calendar month a CRO retainer ships 2–3 experiments and produces a lift report. Here's how a representative month is structured.
Indicative figures across 6 active SA CRO retainers, measured at the 6-month mark. CRO compounds — month-on-month lifts stack on each other when the loss-rate is low.
We offer a one-off audit for teams that want to know what's broken, and two retainer tiers for teams that want it fixed and re-tuned every month. 3-month minimum on retainers; month-to-month afterwards.
Honest answers about traffic minimums, win-rates, what we won't do, and how to know if CRO is right for your stage.
No commitment. We'll record a screen-share walkthrough of your funnel, point out the 3 biggest leak points, and tell you what we'd test first. About 40% of teardowns turn into retainers. The other 60% are useful anyway.