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Conversion optimisation.
We tell you first whether it works for you.

A real A/B test needs around 1,500 conversions per variant. Very few sites have that — and nearly every agency sells it anyway. We do the maths for you before you pay. And if testing can't work at your traffic, we say so, and do the work that does.

1,500
Conversions per variant — the real threshold for a test that means anything
90%
Of A/B tests fail — at Google Ads, Netflix and Airbnb
0.1–1%
Realistic uplift per winning test. Not 87%

Do the sums
before you buy.

How much traffic an A/B test needs isn't an opinion. It's a formula. Here it is, for a site with a 2% conversion rate.

Visitors needed per variant · 2% baseline · 95% confidence · 80% power

The smaller the effect you're looking for, the more brutal the maths.

And you never know in advance how big the effect will be. So you have to plan for the small case.

Uplift sought Visitors per variant Total per test At 5,000 visits/month
5% 309,928 619,855 124 months
10% 78,039 156,078 31 months
20% 19,784 39,568 8 months
50% 3,292 6,585 1.3 months

Halve the effect you're looking for, and the traffic you need quadruples. This is why Speero — the agency behind CXL, $10,000/month — publicly turns away every client under 100,000 visitors a month and sends them to conversion research instead of testing. That is the most expensive admission in the industry, and therefore the most credible.

At 5,000 visits a month, a single test for a 10% uplift takes two and a half years. Anyone still selling you "A/B testing with statistical significance" is selling you something that cannot exist at your scale.

Run the maths on my numbers →

Even the best in the world
win 1 in 10.

Share of A/B tests that actually improve the target metric — at companies with in-house statisticians and millions of users.

33%
Microsoft
A third win, a third neutral, a third make things worse
15%
Bing
Across thousands of experiments a year
10%
Google Ads · Netflix
Nine out of ten ideas don't work
8%
Airbnb Search
Best team, worst hit rate
★ Ronny Kohavi — built the experimentation platform at Microsoft and Bing

"We have been involved in tens of thousands of A/B tests that ran at Airbnb, Booking, Amazon, and Microsoft, and have never seen any change that improves conversions anywhere near this amount."

— on a CRO case study claiming "+337% conversions". His finding on the real magnitude: "Most progress is made by small continuous improvements: 0.1%–1% after a lot of work."
Sources: Kohavi & Thomke, Harvard Business Review 2017 · KDD 2013

Which one is yours
is decided by your traffic.

Not by your budget. We'll tell you which in the first call — even when the cheaper one earns us less.

Under ~100,000 visitors / month

Optimisation by expertise

Testing can't work for you — the maths above shows why. So we don't measure, we decide well: on real user behaviour, heuristics, and ten years of seeing what makes funnels fail.

  • Session recordings & heatmaps analysed
  • Heuristic expert review of your funnel
  • User testing with real people from your audience
  • Form, copy and page-speed work
  • Big swings instead of micro-tweaks
  • KPI observation after rollout — without significance theatre
From ~100,000 visitors / month

Experimentation programme

You have the volume for real tests. So we run them — properly: sample size fixed in advance, no peeking, every winner replicated before it ships.

  • Everything in "Optimisation by expertise"
  • Hypothesis prioritisation via the PXL framework
  • Power analysis before every test
  • Two-week minimum runtime, no peeking
  • Sample Ratio Mismatch check on every test
  • Replication run before a winner stays

What we don't do —
and why.

These three are standard practice in CRO. Every one of them produces numbers that look good and mean nothing.

Promise uplift percentages

"We'll lift your conversion by 87%" isn't a forecast, it's a sales line. Kohavi has never seen anything of that magnitude across tens of thousands of tests — realistic is 0.1–1% per winning test.

We guarantee method and transparency. Not a number nobody can know.

Stop tests when they look good

Checking a running test and stopping at "95% significance!" is how most agency wins are made. It pushes the true false-positive rate from 5% to 26.1%. One in four "winners" is then noise.

We fix the sample size in advance and stick to it.

Test variants until one wins

From Microsoft's research: test five treatments and the false-positive rate goes from 2.5% to 12%. Six rounds of five treatments and the chance of a "significant" result exceeds 50% — even when the change provably does nothing.

That is precisely how success stories get manufactured from dead hypotheses.

Sources for this page

  1. Win rates, "0.1–1% real progress", "a third make things worse" — Kohavi & Thomke, Harvard Business Review 2017; KDD 2013 (peer-reviewed)
  2. Sample sizes — Evan Miller, Sample Size Calculator, cross-checked against Kohavi's formula (±2% agreement)
  3. Peeking → 26.1% false positives — Evan Miller, "How Not To Run An A/B Test"
  4. "The smaller a business is, the less likely it is to have a positive expected ROI from A/B testing" — Georgi Georgiev, Analytics-Toolkit
  5. 100,000-visitor minimum — Speero (CXL)
What it costs.

In our research, not one German-speaking CRO agency published a real rate card. Some run a page titled "What does CRO cost?" that contains no figure at all. Here are ours.

Entry
990one-time
Conversion audit. Afterwards you know where the losses are — and whether testing is even possible for you.
  • Funnel & drop-off analysis
  • Session recordings analysed
  • Heuristic expert review
  • Power calculation on your numbers
  • Prioritised action list
  • 1h call — the report is yours
Request the audit
Experimentation
2,900/ month
Real A/B tests. Only sensible from ~100,000 visitors/month — we check that first, not you.
  • Everything in Optimisation
  • Power analysis before every test
  • 1–2 clean tests per month
  • No peeking, fixed runtimes
  • SRM check on every test
  • Replication of every winner
  • Test knowledge base for your team
Check eligibility

All prices excl. VAT · The audit (€990) is credited in full against your first month if you continue with a retainer · Cancel monthly, no minimum term, no setup fee · Swiss clients are billed in CHF

Why we're below market price — and what that doesn't mean.

The verifiable DACH benchmarks: €1,500–3,000/month entry (Löwenstark) and a recommendation to plan with at least €3,000/month (suxeedo). Speero in the US charges $10,000. We sit below that — for three reasons, none of which is "less quality".

No overhead. No account managers, no slide-deck department. You work with the founder.
No testing-theatre line items. We don't bill you for A/B tests that can only measure noise at your traffic. At many providers that's the single biggest item on the invoice.
Six retainers maximum. We scale through selection, not volume.

No account manager.

Founder

Christoph Sacher

ResultStars — funnels, conversion, visibility

I've been building funnels meant to convert for over ten years — and I've seen enough tests that proved nothing to know when to leave them alone. The difference between an amateur and a professional in CRO isn't who tests more. It's who knows when testing is nonsense.

"Most agencies sell A/B testing to everyone because it sounds like science. For most clients it measures noise. I'd rather tell you your traffic isn't enough — and then do the work that actually moves things." — Christoph Sacher
10+
Years experience
180+
Projects shipped
€990
Audit, credited back
6
Retainers maximum
Cancel monthly — no 12-month lock-in
You work with me directly, not with a junior
If conversion work won't help you, I'll say so in the first call

The most honest section
on this page.

We won't show you a case study with "+340% conversion".

Numbers like that are on almost every CRO page. They're nearly always made the same way: a test with too few participants, stopped early, at the right moment. At low statistical power, a significant result systematically exaggerates the effect — it's called the winner's curse. A meta-analysis of 115 public CRO tests found: mean uplift 3.77%, only 46% significant at all, around 70% underpowered. The "winners" in it averaged nearly three times the true typical effect.

This page itself carried "87% average conversion increase" in its description until recently. That wasn't provable, and we removed it — rather than hiding it behind small print, as is customary in this industry.

What we offer instead: the maths on your own numbers, before you pay. If your traffic is enough, we test — and you get real results at honest magnitudes. If it isn't, we say so and do the work that helps without testing. What we won't do: promise you a number nobody can know.

Answers to common questions.

Because it's maths, not opinion. To reliably detect a 10% uplift at a 2% conversion rate you need roughly 78,000 visitors per variant — over 156,000 per test. At 5,000 visits a month, a single test would finish in two and a half years. By then your site, your offer and your market have changed three times over. A test that runs shorter isn't measuring your offer, it's measuring chance — it produces a number but no information. This is exactly why Speero ($10,000/month) turns away clients under 100,000 visitors.
Because nobody can know that before the work is done. Ronny Kohavi, who built the experimentation platform at Microsoft and Bing, writes after tens of thousands of tests at Airbnb, Booking, Amazon and Microsoft that he has never seen magnitudes like that. Realistic is 0.1–1% per winning test — and only about one test in ten wins at all. Anyone quoting you a percentage upfront either invented it or derived it from an underpowered test that systematically exaggerates it. We guarantee method, not numbers.
Honest answer: informed design decisions, not measurement. We see in session recordings where people drop out, we test with real people from your audience, and we know the patterns that make funnels fail — broken forms, unclear offer, missing trust, load time. These are real, fixable problems that need no statistics. What we won't claim: that we can prove to you afterwards exactly how much it gained. Anyone promising both at your traffic — impact and proof — is promising something impossible.
Rule of thumb: from around 100,000 visitors or 1,000 conversions a month. Conversions matter more than visitors — the threshold sits at roughly 1,500 per variant for a 10% effect, almost regardless of your baseline conversion rate. We run that calculation with your real numbers in the audit rather than applying a blanket rule. If you're just below, there are ways through: test bigger changes rather than smaller ones (at a 50% target effect the requirement drops to a twenty-fourth), or measure conversion to the next funnel step rather than the final sale.
At low traffic: honestly, fairly close. The difference is the evidence base — we don't guess at what looks nice, we look at where users actually drop out and work through patterns we know from hundreds of funnels. At high traffic it becomes a discipline of its own, because then you can measure instead of believe. Anyone selling CRO at 3,000 visitors as "data-driven science" is selling you web design with a dashboard in front of it.
Because it's real work: funnel analysis, reviewing recordings, expert review, power calculation on your numbers, a prioritised action list. A free audit is either superficial or a sales call in disguise. If you book a retainer afterwards, we credit the full €990 against your first month — so it was effectively free. If you don't, the report is still yours, action list included, to implement yourself or with another agency. And "conversion work isn't worth it for you right now, put the money into reach" is a perfectly legitimate audit outcome.
Yes. No notice period, no exit fee, no contract. One email and you're out at the end of the month. In an industry where 12-month lock-ins are standard, that's unusual — and it's a very direct incentive on our side.
Yes — and those are often the clients where real testing becomes possible, because the traffic and conversions are there. For shops we have a dedicated page under Online shops. For B2B SaaS with long sales cycles, combining conversion work with AI visibility usually makes more sense than testing alone — there the shortlist decides, not the button colour.

Do the maths first.
Then optimise.

Conversion audit for €990 — credited against your first month. You get the funnel analysis, the prioritised action list, and the power calculation on your real numbers. Afterwards you know whether testing is even possible for you. The report is yours, whether you continue or not.

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