Conversion rate optimisation specialist. Marrallisa Kreijkes turns the visitors you have into enquiries.

Your website gets visitors. Google Analytics shows the sessions, the ads report clicks, and still the enquiries lag behind what that traffic should produce. The usual answer is more traffic: a bigger ad budget, another SEO push. Meanwhile the page that loses those people stays exactly as it was.

A conversion rate optimisation specialist starts with the people who are already there. Marrallisa Kreijkes, founder of Viralistic, designs websites in Figma, builds them in Astro, measures them in GA4 and automates what happens after the form. That means the person who finds the problem can also fix it. She has taught the same way of working for DataCamp, on the main stage of n8n, in a lecture at Anthropic and in a training at Volkswagen Pon Financial Services. If you work with her, you work with the person those organisations asked to explain it.

What does a conversion rate optimisation specialist do?

A conversion rate optimisation specialist finds out why visitors do not take the next step, fixes what stands in their way and measures whether the fix worked. In the United States the same role is often called a conversion rate optimization consultant or a CRO specialist. The title matters less than the work.

That work has four parts:

1. Measurement. Make sure Google Analytics 4 records every enquiry, call and booking. Without that, every later decision is a guess.
2. Research. Follow the route from landing page to enquiry with analytics, heatmaps, session recordings and a few user tests, until you can say where and why people leave.
3. Change. Rewrite the headline, shorten the form, move the proof next to the button, speed up the page. Obvious faults get fixed. Real doubts get tested.
4. Learning. Record what each change did, including the ones that made no difference, so the next round starts smarter.

Most CRO specialists stop at the advice. A report lands in your inbox and somebody else has to design, build and track the changes. At Viralistic the same hands do the research, the design in Figma, the build in Astro and the measurement, which is why a finding can be live the same week. Our guide to conversion rate optimisation explains the discipline itself in more depth.

When do you need a CRO specialist, and when not?

You need a CRO specialist when traffic is steady but enquiries lag, when you pay for ads that land on a page that loses people, or when a redesign is coming and you want it to convert from the first day. You do not need one yet when almost nobody visits the site.

Good reasons to hire one:

• Your main pages get traffic, but the conversion rate stays flat or falls.
• You run Google Ads or Meta campaigns, and the cost per enquiry keeps rising.
• Visitors reach the contact page and leave without sending the form.
• You have a redesign planned and want research, not taste, to decide the structure.
• You sell a premium service and the site looks below the standard of the work.

Honest reasons to wait:

• Too little traffic. With a few hundred visitors a month, the first problem is being found. Start with SEO and visibility in AI answers, then optimise.
• The offer is the problem. If the price, the product or the positioning does not fit the market, no button colour will fix it. That is a strategy question.
• The site is about to be rebuilt anyway. Then put the CRO research into the new website instead of polishing pages that will disappear.
• You need a large experimentation team. A shop running dozens of A/B tests a month needs a team of analysts and developers. A specialised experimentation agency fits that better, and we will tell you so.

How does Marrallisa work? CRO as Lean for your funnel

Marrallisa treats conversion rate optimisation as Lean management applied to your funnel: every moment of friction is waste, and every change runs through a short Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle. The method is simple to explain and hard to fake, because each step leaves a measurable trace.

Friction is waste: the eight wastes of a website

Lean names eight types of waste in a production process. Each one has a direct twin on a website, and a CRO audit hunts for all eight.

Mapping the whole route, from the first search to a signed client, is a value stream map for your funnel. It shows where people wait, where they get lost and where the business loses them after they did everything right. Many fixes are poka-yoke, error-proofing: a phone field that accepts any format, a date picker that only offers free slots, a form that explains what went wrong instead of clearing itself.

Every change runs through a PDCA cycle

A CRO programme is a series of PDCA cycles. Plan: write a hypothesis from the research. Do: change one part of one page, or start an A/B test. Check: compare the result with the baseline in GA4. Act: make it the standard, or drop it and record why.

The cycle keeps the work honest. It stops anyone from redesigning five things at once and claiming the one that worked, and it builds a record of what your clients respond to that no competitor has.

Measurement comes before any change

Nothing changes until the measurement is right. In GA4, Google now calls the actions that matter to your business key events, while a conversion is the version used to measure and bid in Google Ads. We set up the key events, check that form submissions, calls and bookings arrive, and take a baseline per page and per device.

The follow-up is part of the funnel

The fastest conversion win is often after the form. In their Harvard Business Review study The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington concluded that most companies do not respond to online leads nearly fast enough. A visitor who sends an enquiry and hears nothing has converted on paper and been lost in practice.

So a CRO project at Viralistic includes the follow-up. With n8n, the enquiry goes straight into your CRM, the right person gets a message, and the visitor receives a personal confirmation with a clear next step. Where AI helps, for example to sort an enquiry or draft a reply, a person checks it before it goes out. Our automation specialist page explains how we build and govern those workflows.

Why most premium websites should not start with A/B tests

Most premium and B2B websites do not have the traffic for reliable A/B tests, and a specialist who only sells testing sells you time. Fix what is broken first, research the rest with real people and test only what is genuinely in doubt.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. With Evan Miller’s rule of thumb, a page that converts at 2 percent needs about 19,600 visitors per variant to detect a 20 percent lift. For a page with 3,000 visitors a month, that test runs for more than a year. Stopping early when the variant looks good makes it worse: in Miller’s worst-case example, checking for significance after every visitor produced a false winner 26.1 percent of the time.

There is a faster route. Jakob Nielsen showed that testing with five users uncovers about 85 percent of the usability problems in a design, and he recommends several small rounds over one large study. Five people from your audience, a task and a quiet observer will tell you more about a premium service page than a test that never finishes. When traffic does allow testing, we test bold changes, such as a new page structure, because a bigger effect needs fewer visitors to prove.

What you get: CRO audit, CRO programme or a landing page built to convert

You can work with Marrallisa in three ways: a one-off CRO audit, a monthly CRO programme or one landing page redesigned and built to convert. All three start with measurement and end with something you keep.

The CRO audit

The audit is the research half of the cycle, done once and thoroughly. You get a check of GA4 and your key events, heatmaps and session recordings of the pages that matter, a review of the UX and copy against the reasons people hesitate, and Core Web Vitals per page template. It ends in a prioritised test plan: every idea with a hypothesis, an expected effect and an effort score. An audit that ends in a thick report without priorities has not done its job.

The CRO programme

The programme turns the plan into monthly PDCA cycles. Each month brings new research, the changes with the most promise, A/B tests where your traffic supports them, and a short report in plain language on what changed and what you learned. Because we design and build ourselves, the winning version goes live without a hand-off to another agency.

The landing page built to convert

Sometimes one page carries most of the business: the service page your ads point to, the booking page, the page for your most profitable offer. We research it, redesign it in Figma and build it in Astro, which ships no JavaScript by default and stays fast on an older phone. It goes live with measurement in place, so you see from the first week whether it beats the old version.

What does a conversion rate optimisation specialist cost?

A CRO audit with Marrallisa costs from EUR 2,500, a CRO programme from EUR 2,500 per month and a landing page built to convert from EUR 4,500, all excluding VAT. Where you land depends on the size of the funnel, the state of your tracking and how much we build ourselves.

These factors move the price:

• The number of page templates and funnels in scope. A single service page costs less than a booking flow with five steps.
• The state of your measurement. If GA4 and Tag Manager first need repair, that work comes first.
• Traffic. More traffic means more A/B tests are possible, and more to analyse.
• Who builds the changes. On an Astro or Webflow site we implement them ourselves; on another platform we brief your developer.
• Copy and photography. A page that needs new texts or a shoot costs more than a page that needs a new structure.

The comparison that matters is not the fee but the traffic you already pay for. Take a site with 10,000 visitors a month that converts at 1 percent: 100 enquiries. At 1.5 percent the same traffic brings 150, without spending more on ads. That is a worked example, not a promise. Which changes pay off on your site is what measurement tells you.

Proof: what you can check before you hire

Judge a conversion rate optimisation specialist on what you can verify: who trusted them to teach, what they built and how openly they talk about results. You will find no promised uplift percentages on this page. Anyone who guarantees a percentage before seeing your data is guessing.

What you can check:

• Teaching. Marrallisa presented the DataCamp webinar How to turn a business process into an agentic workflow, spoke on the main stage of n8n In The Loop in Berlin as an official n8n Ambassador, gave a lecture at Anthropic, trained Volkswagen Pon Financial Services and taught a hands-on n8n workshop at Maastricht University. More on her talks on the speaker page.
• Websites built around one next step. For Azade Ozkan, a maker of handmade furniture, every page leads to one 15-minute consultation, introduced with her photo, so the call to action feels like an invitation from a person. For Shoop Shoop we wrote the StoryBrand BrandScript, designed the wireframes and delivered a new website that repositioned the agency for the top segment.
• Traffic worth converting. For ATR Transmissies, organic traffic on transmissies.nl climbed to 1.2K visits a month with 115 keywords in the top 3 (Ahrefs, October 2026). More visitors is exactly when the conversion question gets loud.
• Research we rely on. In the Milliseconds Make Millions study, commissioned by Google and run by 55 and Deloitte across 37 brand sites, a 0.1 second improvement in mobile speed lifted progression to the contact page by 20.6 percent on luxury sites. Lead generation sites saw 21.6 percent more users reach the form submission page. Our guide to luxury websites that convert explains how we design with that in mind.

Freelance CRO specialist or CRO agency?

Choose a freelance CRO specialist when you want one senior person who knows your business and answers your call. Choose a large CRO agency when you run dozens of tests a month and need a team of analysts, designers and developers. Viralistic sits between the two: you work with Marrallisa directly, with design, build, search and automation in the same hands.

The weak spot of the freelancer is capacity; the weak spot of the agency is distance. Ask anyone you consider who will do the work on your account, and who builds what they recommend.

How to choose a conversion rate optimisation specialist

Choose the specialist who starts with your measurement, asks about your clients before your colours, and can explain when an A/B test is the wrong tool. Five questions sort the field quickly:

1. How would you start on my site? A good answer begins with tracking and the route to an enquiry, not with a list of best practices.
2. What do you do when my traffic is too low to test? Listen for user tests, heatmaps and before-and-after measurement. “We test anyway” is the wrong answer.
3. Who builds the changes? If the answer is “your developer”, ask who writes the brief and checks the result.
4. How do you decide when a test ends? The answer should be a sample size fixed in advance, not “when it looks significant”.
5. What happens after someone fills in the form? A specialist who ignores the follow-up optimises half the funnel.

A conversion rate optimisation specialist for your website

A conversion rate optimisation specialist earns their fee by turning visitors you already pay for into enquiries, and by proving it with measurement you can read. Marrallisa Kreijkes does that as one strategic lead for research, design, build and follow-up, with the method she teaches for DataCamp, n8n, Anthropic and Volkswagen. Plan a 30-minute call and you get an honest view of where your site loses people, and whether an audit, a programme or one new page is the right first step.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a conversion rate optimisation specialist cost?

A CRO audit with Marrallisa costs from EUR 2,500, a monthly CRO programme from EUR 2,500 per month and a landing page built to convert from EUR 4,500, all excluding VAT. The price depends on the number of pages and funnels, the state of your tracking and how much we build ourselves. You get a proposal before any work starts.

What does a CRO audit include?

A CRO audit includes a check that GA4 records every enquiry, call and booking as a key event, heatmaps and session recordings of your main pages, a review of the UX and copy against the reasons visitors hesitate, and a prioritised test plan with a hypothesis for each idea. You keep the plan, whoever carries it out.

Should I hire a freelance CRO specialist or a CRO agency?

Hire a freelance specialist when you want one senior person who knows your business and works with you directly. Choose an agency when you run dozens of tests a month and need a full team. With Viralistic you work with Marrallisa directly, and the design, the build and the follow-up automation stay in the same hands.

How long does it take before CRO shows results?

Fixes to broken forms, faulty tracking and slow pages show up within weeks, once enough visitors have passed through. Tested changes take longer, because a test runs until it reaches the sample size you set in advance. Plan conversion rate optimisation as a series of monthly cycles over several months, not as a one-off project.

What do I need to prepare before working with a CRO specialist?

Prepare access to Google Analytics 4, Search Console, Tag Manager and your website or CMS. Add the one action that matters most, how many enquiries became clients last quarter and a few recent client conversations about why they chose you. The sales side of the funnel often explains what the analytics cannot.

Does my website have enough traffic for A/B testing?

Often not, and that is fine. A page that converts at 2 percent needs about 19,600 visitors per variant to detect a 20 percent lift. Below that, user tests with five people, heatmaps and before-and-after measurement in GA4 teach you more, and faster, than a test that never reaches its sample size.

What is the difference between CRO and SEO?

SEO brings the right people to your website through Google and AI answers. CRO makes sure those people then get in touch, book or buy. They need each other: traffic to a page that does not convert is wasted, and a page that converts well but is never found earns nothing. We plan both in one roadmap.

Can you work on a website you did not build?

Yes. The audit works on any platform, from WordPress and Shopify to Webflow and custom builds. We build changes ourselves in Astro or Webflow, and on other platforms we write a precise brief for your developer and check the result. If the platform itself is the bottleneck, we say so before you spend more on it.

Can a CRO specialist guarantee a higher conversion rate?

No, and be careful with anyone who does. A specialist can guarantee the work: correct measurement, real research, fixes and tests run properly. The outcome also depends on your offer, your traffic and your market. What we do promise is that every change is measured against a baseline, so you see exactly what worked.