25 CRO Agency Stats We Bet You’ve Never Seen Before

It has never been a better or tougher time to run a CRO agency.

Clients are building in-house capabilities, moving experimentation to product teams, and asking sharper questions about velocity and ROI.

Agencies are pressed to differentiate, scale intelligently, and decide where they sit on the execution-to-enablement spectrum.

This indicates a tectonic shift in the CRO agency model.

We ran 40 hour-long interviews and collected 200+ survey responses from CRO agency leaders. What emerged is a map of an industry in flux, with clear signals about what’s working, what’s outdated, and where the smartest agencies are heading.

Here are 25 stats and insights you won’t find anywhere else.

237 Agencies. Standing Out Is Getting Harder.

We counted 237 experimentation agencies globally. Nearly double our initial estimate. Most CRO agencies operate quietly, under the radar, small in headcount but long in experience. Only 7% have more than 30 employees. Yet 40% have over a decade of experimentation behind them.

The invisibility problem: Most agencies are hard to find. And with AI overviews, zero-click search, and AI chat recommendations reshaping discovery, even more agencies (especially the smaller ones) will become invisible. This invisibility quickly turns into irrelevance.

As a smaller agency, your moat isn’t size or services. It’s being known for something sharp, trustworthy, and visible. Sameness is easy to ignore.

The differentiation gap: Of all the agencies we surveyed, only 2% specialize in QA and build. QA is one of the most criticized aspects of experimentation tooling, and one of the few places agencies can shine operationally. Yet most agencies don’t differentiate here either.

90% say they offer “strategy.” But ask three agencies what that means and you’ll get three wildly different answers. For some, it’s test prioritization. For others, it’s building experimentation into the operating model. Everyone’s using the same word, but selling different offers.

The velocity problem: 60% of agency practitioners run two or fewer tests per month. For all the evangelism the experimentation industry enjoys, actual throughput is often low. And that matters, because high-velocity teams learn faster and expose bottlenecks earlier.

Agencies Are All Over the Place With Tools and Tech

There’s no clear stack consensus in the CRO agency ecosystem. Everyone’s using the mix of tools they prefer or tools their clients are already using, and each mix reveals what teams fear the most: friction, inflexibility, and irrelevance.

Convert is the go-to for mid-sized teams, with 73% adoption. Our platform is also preferred by agencies running 21-30 tests per month with over 80% adoption. These are the teams living in the tension between scale and control. They pick tools that won’t slow them down, with flexibility, fast support, and transparency.

Optimizely tells a different story: 73% adoption among large agencies, but only 21% among mid-sized teams. Bigger teams have the operational depth to justify a heavyweight platform. Mid-sized ones don’t.

Data visualization tools reveal a different axis of fragmentation: Looker Studio is used by 55% of small teams, but only 46% of large ones. Early-stage agencies still piece together performance visibility from basic dashboards. Large teams often lean on bespoke setups or integrate across multiple tools, especially in analytics-heavy verticals.

Then there’s Contentsquare: 66% of large agencies use it, compared to just 21% of small teams. Its value is clear, but only once an agency has the volume and budget to operationalize it fully.

Adobe Analytics has 0% usage among starter agencies. That jumps to over 30% among mature ones. The takeaway here isn’t “Adobe wins with mature agencies.” It’s that the tooling gap between small and large shops is wide.

This stack fragmentation reflects real constraints such as technical capacity, client volume, budget control, and vendor relationships.

Agencies picking tools that grow stale, slow, or siloed will lose velocity. Vendors ignoring the needs of scrappier, high-potential teams will miss the next wave of growth.

Most Agency-Vendor Relationships Don’t Feel Like Partnerships

97% of agencies say trust is the single most important factor in choosing a vendor. Not features or price. Trust.

But trust is twofold: trust in the product and trust in the partner.

The product has to deliver, i.e., no bugs, no surprises, and no convoluted pricing that tanks client relationships. But even a perfect product can’t compensate for a vendor who competes for your clients or ignores you once the contract is signed.

“We are never going to recommend a tool even if the kickback is good, but it’s not the best tool for the job. The thing that’s going to sway us more than anything else is whether we believe that this tool will let us deliver exceptional service for these clients and therefore retain them for years.”

Jon Crowder, Journey Further

Yet this kind of alignment is rare.

92% of agencies say lead generation is a crucial part of any partnership. But most vendors stop at the one-time, first-year referral bonus and call it a day.

Fewer than 5% of vendors reward agencies for renewals, even though retention is a shared outcome.

Agencies don’t need more training webinars. They need meaningful alignment, support, visibility, influence, and growth. They need vendors who show up like partners.

Where Agencies Grow And Where They Stall

The difference between an agency stuck in execution and one leading strategic transformation is direction.

60% of experimentation agencies now offer client enablement services (audits, playbooks, XP ops). It’s a sign of the shift: agencies moving from executors to capability builders. From doers to enablers.

And the clients’ demand for this is real. Nearly 80% of agencies say their clients now expect greater ROI and testing velocity. In response, 70% of agencies agree they now focus more on strategic experimentation and less on tactical testing.

This mindset shift toward solving systemic performance issues reflects client dynamics as well. 87% of large agencies are seeing clients bring more experimentation in-house. Instead of having agencies run tests for them, they’re asking for frameworks, coaching, maturity audits, and support for internal teams.

And these internal teams aren’t marketing teams alone. Experimentation is shifting towards product teams, as 58% of small agencies agree, and over half of mid-sized and large ones agree as well. This means agencies are being asked to speak a different language, integrate into different workflows, and influence product roadmaps.

But not all paths up the value chain lead to growth.

We mapped six distinct growth pathways based on agency interviews. Only three of them lead to both higher value and higher revenue:

• Strategic influence
• Experimentation transformation
• Ecosystem leadership

The others—generalization and implementation-heavy services—keep the lights on but rarely command premium pricing. They’re the default fallback when differentiation falters.

Dedicated experimentation agencies show what strong positioning looks like. They over-index in analytics, qual research, and coaching. Full-service agencies, by contrast, often dilute value with implementation work.

Specialization matters. Nearly 30% of agencies now offer mobile or app A/B testing. Yet most tool vendors still haven’t caught up. Few provide the APIs or agent-ready support needed for mobile testing to scale.

Shopify testing is offered by nearly 60% of agencies. The opportunity is there. But the infrastructure? Let’s look on the bright side: this is a rapidly growing platform specialization.

Also, as teams scale, their service mix shifts. Service offering increases by 25% as team size grows, from hybrid generalist roles in small teams to specialized functions in large ones.

We also see clear differences in the type of services CRO agencies offer:

From A/B testing tool selection and installation, workshops and training to maturity audits and data support, this diversification reveals a service model that moves with team maturity. Larger teams enable more, advise more, and help build capability within client orgs.

But this isn’t all about today’s channels only.

AI Isn’t Optional Anymore. It’s Operational.

76% of agencies say AI is now part of their experimentation workflow. Adoption is highest among newer agencies—88% of starters vs. 75% of mature ones. Younger players are leaning harder into speed and automation. They’re designing fresh workflows with AI baked in, not bolted on. And it’s not just for writing copy or tweaking CSS.

Agencies use AI for ideation, hypothesis generation, thematic research, experiment prioritization, and even some QA and analysis.

Stephen Pavlovich, Founder of Conversion, a GAIN specialist, chatted with us about using machine learning to assign confidence scores to test ideas. Their system (made up of several algorithms) learns from thousands of past tests to surface what’s likely to work next.

The shift from human-only workflows to AI-supported workflows is massive.

Agencies not adapting risk being leapfrogged. Vendors and clients increasingly expect AI-augmented support and results.

But remember… AI isn’t replacing strategic thinking. It’s removing the drag. Teams that learn how to pair their judgment with intelligent automation will outpace, out-learn, and out-serve the rest.

Wrapping Up

These 25 CRO agency stats make up the snapshot of a market in motion.

Agencies are maturing, but discoverability is collapsing. Testing velocity is low, but “strategy” claims are high. Tool stacks are fragmented. Partnerships run on trust, yet most vendors still think in bonuses. AI is an accelerant, yet some teams still treat it like a novelty.

The CRO agency model is evolving fast. Those that grow will transition from service providers to strategic enablers, from tool resellers to trusted advisors.

This data is your early signal. The rest will catch up later.