10 Questions 8 and 9-Figure DTC Brands Must Ask Before Hiring a Landing Page Agency

The biggest mistake DTC brands make is evaluating portfolios before understanding the agency's research process. 

This guide is for operators running 8-figure DTC brands ($10M+) through 9-figure brands evaluating landing page agency partnerships. The questions below are the ones any rigorous buyer should ask, and they're calibrated to surface real operational capability rather than sales-deck polish. 

But before we get into the questions themselves, you should know where they come from. These are framed around patterns we see in our sales calls, specifically the regrets prospects bring with them from their last agency: the slow turnarounds, the pages that looked good but didn't convert, and the research process that turned out to be a mood board and a persona doc. You've probably heard some version of these stories yourself, or lived them.

1. Is landing page design their core specialty, or a side offering?

This is the most basic filter, and the one brands skip most often. A landing page is a conversion tool built for a specific audience arriving from a specific ad, and it needs to be designed and optimized for that purpose, not treated as just another web page.

Since you'll likely be sending thousands of visitors to that page through paid ads, you need it built by a team that understands conversion optimization, conversion copywriting, and performance marketing, not just visual design.

Pretty pages and lucky conversions

A web design agency may be able to design a beautiful landing page. A Shopify dev shop can build one that loads fast. But without deep knowledge of CRO, all you'll have is a good-looking page whose success depends on luck.

It's tempting (and often cheaper) to ask your existing design or Shopify agency to build a landing page. But consider working with an agency with a proven track record in landing pages and optimization, like a conversion optimization agency, rather than one that treats landing pages as an add-on to its core business.

Ecommerce landing pages are not SaaS landing pages

If you search for landing page strategies, recommended layouts, or examples, you'll quickly realize that a lot of the content out there is about lead-gen landing pages for software companies and service providers.

There aren't many examples of ecommerce landing pages or much content about ecommerce landing pages as a whole. While our data shows that landing pages can often outperform a homepage, product page, or collection page, there are many misconceptions and a lack of education about how to best use them in ecommerce.

Many marketers and agencies come from the direct-response marketing world or build landing pages for online courses. Those pages may work for their industries, but if you're a modern DTC brand, the last thing you want is a page that looks like it came from the glory days of affiliate marketing.

You need a clean landing page that matches your brand and resonates with your customers, and the best way to ensure that is by working with an agency that's done this for design-focused ecommerce brands like yours.

2. Show me your customer research process before you touch a Figma file

If they jump straight to design or "best practices," walk away immediately. The research process is the single most reliable signal of whether an agency will deliver results or just deliverables.

9 times out of 10, a page built on real customer research beats one built solely on best practices. Ask the agency: how do you gather voice-of-customer data? What questions do you ask? How does that translate into copy hierarchy?

Best practices are averages, and averages don't know your customer

Best practices describe what worked for someone else's audience, offer, and traffic source. A research-driven agency starts by asking different questions: what do your customers already believe about this product? What objections stop them from buying? What language do they use to describe their problem?

The answers to those questions determine copy hierarchy, page structure, and offer framing. Without them, every design decision is a guess dressed up as expertise. Ask the agency to walk you through a specific example of how their research changed a page's direction, not just improved it, but fundamentally changed what the page said and to whom.

Here at SplitBase, for example, we follow the Testing Trifecta process.

Before we start designing and testing a landing page (top circle in the chart), we conduct analytics and human conversion research, which serves as the foundation for everything above it.

We start by analyzing the brand's existing analytics. We want to understand, among many other things:

• Which paths are people taking that lead to a conversion? Which pages are they landing on first, visiting second, and which actions lead to a higher conversion rate?
• Which traffic sources have the biggest opportunity for increased conversions? Which ones convert well, which ones don't, and why?
• Where are people getting stuck on the website? Where are they dropping off and leaving without buying?
• How are the highest-converting visitors getting to the website? What are they looking for? What do they buy?

Once we start getting answers, we have enough data to determine which landing pages are most necessary, which products or offers should be featured, and what should be avoided.

The next step is the human analysis, which is a simpler word for qualitative research. Now that the bigger picture is clear and the strategy is mostly decided, we need to know what makes people buy, what questions they have about the products and the brand that could stop them from buying, and who the best customers really are.

Since analytics only show you numbers, but your customers are humans, and buying is a mixture of logic and emotion, we need data from open-ended surveys, polls, and customer interviews. This part of the research process is critical because it reveals how to write landing page copy, which words to use, and which objections to address. Without it, you're guessing.

Red flag: mood boards before research

Agencies that lead with mood boards, color palettes, or "conversion-optimized templates" before discussing research are telling you something important. They're designers, not optimizers. Beautiful pages that don't convert are expensive decorations.

Demand a clear answer on what VOC data they collect, how they analyze existing analytics, and how research translates into copy and layout decisions before a single wireframe is drawn. For the broader research methodology framework, see [the Landing Page Conversion Rate article].

3. Do you have category experience, or are you learning on my dime?

Don't be the brand that pays an agency to figure out what they can and can't say. Category expertise isn't a nice-to-have. It's a prerequisite, especially if you're in wellness, supplements, beauty, or anything with FDA constraints or category nuance.

Compliance mistakes are expensive

Health and wellness brands face FDA and FTC constraints on claims; supplement brands have specific rules around before-and-after language and testimonial disclaimers; and beauty brands deal with ingredient-claim sensitivities that can trip up agencies that haven't undergone regulatory review.

An agency without experience in your category will either write copy that exposes you to regulatory risk or water down your messaging so aggressively that it stops converting. Ask them directly: Have you worked with brands in our category? What compliance constraints did you navigate and how?

Purchase psychology differs by price point and product

Category experience also means understanding your customer's purchase psychology. A customer buying a $120 skincare serum has different objections and trust triggers than someone buying a $40 supplement.

Ask the agency to show you portfolio examples from your vertical and explain the strategic decisions behind them. Not just the visual design, but why specific claims, proof elements, and offer structures were chosen for that category and that customer.

4. How many iterations does a winning page actually take, and do you stick around for them?

The biggest misconception we hear from brands: "one landing page is the magic pill." It's not. A landing page only works when it's iterated and tested continuously. If the agency's deliverable is a one-off build and a handshake, you're buying a poster, not a revenue asset.

The one-and-done agency problem

Many agencies are structured to deliver a page and move on. Their business model depends on new projects, not ongoing optimization, and that misalignment is fatal to your results.

We once worked with a client where the winning page increased their conversions by 55%. That's massive, and it represents a significant bump in revenue. But the top-performing page was on its 5th version. The first version flopped. That win came from learning why the early versions failed and testing a better hypothesis each time.

Ask the agency directly: What does your iteration process look like after launch? How many versions do you typically test before declaring a winner? If they can't answer with specifics, they're not running a real optimization program.

What ongoing optimization actually looks like

A real optimization process includes post-launch behavior monitoring through heatmaps and scroll maps, ongoing qualitative research via polls and surveys, a prioritized A/B testing roadmap, and new variants shipped on a consistent monthly cadence.

The agency should be testing different layouts, images, copy, and most importantly, offers. They should be able to articulate a strategy and a prioritized list of tests to run to increase average order value, in addition to the conversion rate.

They should be able to show you a sample testing roadmap and explain how they decide what to test next, not just what they tested last. 

5. What's your actual weekly output?

The number one horror story from prospects who left their last agency: "They looked super solid on the sales call, then only made minor changes and were slow." Velocity matters. If an agency can only ship one test per month, your optimization program will take years to generate meaningful compound lift.

Getting specifics on test volume

Push for concrete numbers. How many A/B tests do they run per client per month? How many new page builds do they deliver per quarter? What does a typical week look like in terms of active work on your account?

Vague answers like "it depends on scope" are a red flag unless they are immediately followed by specific examples from current client engagements.

Benchmark expectations: a serious optimization agency should be running at a minimum 2 to 4 tests per month for an active DTC account. Fewer than that and you're paying for strategy documents, not results.

Get turnaround commitments in writing

Ask for turnaround time commitments in writing. How long from test hypothesis to live variant? What's the SLA for design revisions? Who is your day-to-day contact, and what is their capacity across other accounts?

Agencies that can't answer these questions on a sales call won't answer them faster once you're a client.

6. Who owns the post-click experience, and how do you coordinate with our media team?

There's an "acquisition gap" at most growing brands: performance marketing owns the ad, ecommerce owns the page, and no one owns the funnel. This gap is where conversion rate goes to die. Ask the agency how they bridge it, and if they don't have a clear answer, the CAC problem won't get solved.

The ad promises one thing, and the page delivers another

When your paid social team is optimizing for clicks, and your landing page agency is optimizing for on-page engagement, but no one is accountable for the full journey from impression to purchase, you get fragmented results. The ad promises one thing, the page delivers another, and the customer bounces.

Ask the agency how they coordinate with your media buying team and what their process is for ensuring message match between ad creative and landing page copy.

The best agencies treat post-click as an extension of the ad

They should be reviewing your top-performing ad copy and creative before writing a single word of landing page copy. Ask for examples of how they've structured handoff processes with paid media teams, what shared KPIs they track across the funnel, and how they flag when a conversion problem is actually an ad targeting problem rather than a page problem.

The message-match principle matters at every stage of the buyer journey, and the traffic source determines which page format is appropriate. 

7. What does your testing infrastructure look like, and is the page actually being tested or just launched?

A page that ships and never gets tested is just a guess in production. The agency's testing infrastructure tells you whether they're equipped to generate statistically valid learnings or are just running experiments for optics.

Tools matter, but knowing the difference matters more

Ask which testing platform they use. Serious optimization agencies use dedicated tools: Convert, VWO, or Intelligems for A/B and price testing, paired with behavior analytics tools like Hotjar or FullStory for qualitative insight.

Page builders like Unbounce or Replo are part of the stack, but they are build tools, not testing platforms. If an agency only mentions page builders when you ask about their testing infrastructure, they are designers, not optimizers.

Ask how they determine statistical significance. What confidence threshold do they require before calling a winner? How do they handle tests that reach significance quickly on small sample sizes? Agencies that can't answer these questions fluently are running tests without understanding what the results mean.

When to kill a variant vs. when to iterate on it

A strong agency has a clear decision framework for when to kill a losing variant, when to iterate on a partial winner, and when to scale a clear winner into new traffic segments.

Ask them to walk you through a recent example where they killed a test early and why, and a separate example where they iterated on a losing variant rather than scrapping it. The answers reveal whether they're making data-driven decisions or gut-feel calls dressed up in testing language.

8. What are the deliverables, and where does the page actually live?

This needs to be clear before the project even starts, because the answer affects cost, speed, and how easily you can iterate. When it comes to landing pages, the deliverables could be several things:

1. A design file, which means it's your responsibility to get it coded and running so you can start sending traffic.
2. A fully coded landing page that you upload to your server.
3. A fully built landing page on a platform such as Unbounce, Replo, or another dedicated landing page tool.

Each option has its own pros and cons, and they come at entirely different price points.

Build tools vs. custom code

Web design and development agencies might prefer to sell you on options 1 and 2 because you'll have to go back to them whenever you need an update. But true conversion optimization agencies should be able to offer you option 3: building the page in dedicated landing page software.

In most cases, unless you have a development team available at arm's reach, you're better off building your landing pages in a tool like Unbounce or Replo. It will cost less compared to getting it custom-coded, and it will also be easier and cheaper to maintain since you won't need developers for every small change.

Custom design vs. templates

Another important question: will your landing page be fully custom-designed, or based on a template? If you have a small budget, templates might be your only option. But for any brand with a strong visual identity, templates are a no-go, and you'll want something custom.

A custom design is the only way to ensure your landing page is unique and built according to conversion research data that aligns with your strategy. You also want to make sure your agency doesn't charge you custom design prices for a template that your competitors could end up using too.

9. When should I NOT invest in landing pages yet?

Honest agencies tell you when you're not ready, usually when your offer and value proposition aren't validated yet. Premature landing page optimization is one of the most common ways DTC brands waste budget.

The foundation that needs to be in place first

If you don't know why your best customers buy from you, in their words and not your marketing copy, landing page optimization will just help you fail faster. Before investing in page optimization, you need a validated offer with demonstrated organic or paid demand, a clear value proposition that differentiates you from alternatives, and a paid acquisition program operating at scale rather than testing channels for the first time.

Ask the agency directly: Based on what you know about our business, are we ready for landing page optimization? 

Signs you're optimizing prematurely

If your offer hasn't been validated through any channel, your value proposition changes every quarter, or your paid media program isn't yet profitable at current conversion rates, fix the foundation first. Landing page optimization compounds existing momentum. It doesn't create it from scratch.

If they sell you on hyper-personalized landing pages or 12-variant segmentation strategies on day one without that foundation, they're optimizing for their retainer, not your revenue. 

10. Can I speak to two current clients, not testimonials, actual people I can call?

Community forums are where the truth comes out. Reference checks are where it gets confirmed. Case studies on an agency's website are curated. Client references are not.

Current clients, not alumni from two years ago

Ask for references from clients who are currently active, not just past clients who had a good experience two years ago. Current clients can speak to what the agency is like to work with right now: their responsiveness, their testing velocity, their strategic thinking, and whether the results in the case studies reflect the typical experience or the exceptional one.

If an agency hesitates to provide current client references, that hesitation is the answer. Strong agencies with strong ongoing relationships are proud to make introductions.

The specific questions that reveal the most

When you speak to references, ask these:

• How many tests did they launch in your first 90 days?
• How often do you hear from them proactively, versus having to chase for updates?
• Has their work ever surfaced an insight that changed your broader marketing strategy, not just the landing page?
• Would you re-sign with them if you were starting over today?

The last question is the most important one. Enthusiasm in the answer tells you more than any case study metric.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much should we budget for a landing page agency?

Quality agencies for 8 and 9-figure DTC brands typically charge $8-15K per month for ongoing optimization, or $15-25K for one-off strategic builds. Below $5K per month, agencies generally lack the testing volume and category expertise required to produce meaningful impact at the scale 8-figure-plus brands need. For retainers above $25K per month, you should be receiving genuine strategic depth beyond execution, including research methodologies, brand-aligned testing roadmaps, and proactive insights that shape your broader marketing strategy.

What's the difference between a landing page agency and a CRO agency?

Landing page agencies focus on building and designing pages. CRO agencies own the full optimization process, including testing strategy, analysis, and iteration. For 8- and 9-figure DTC brands, you almost always want the latter: someone who sticks around to optimize across cycles rather than deliver a page and disappear. The brands that get the most value from agency partnerships are the ones that treat the agency as an extension of their CRO program rather than a one-time service provider.

How long will it take to see ROI from landing page optimization?

First test results come in 2 to 4 weeks, but finding true winners typically takes 2 to 3 months of iteration. Agencies promising immediate, dramatic lifts are usually cherry-picking data or running flawed tests. Compounding ROI from a well-run optimization program typically becomes visible at the 6-month mark and compounds significantly through 12 to 18 months.

How should we structure agency and in-house CRO together at an 8 and 9-figure scale?

At an 8 and 9-figure scale, the question isn't whether to use an agency or build in-house, because most brands run both. The right structure is usually a hybrid: agency for research, methodology, and testing strategy, in-house for ongoing execution, implementation, and operational management. The agency brings testing velocity and accumulated cross-client expertise, while the internal team brings business context and faster iteration on tactical decisions. The brands that get this wrong typically either rely entirely on an agency (creating dependency and limited internal learning) or try to build everything in-house before they have the operational maturity to sustain it.

What tools should a landing page agency use?

A testing platform (Convert, VWO, or Intelligems), behavior analytics tools (Hotjar, FullStory), page builders (Unbounce, Replo, or custom-built infrastructure), and analytics beyond GA4. If they only mention page builders when you ask about their stack, they are designers, not optimizers. Strong agencies can also explain why they chose specific tools for specific client situations rather than running every client through the same stack.

How do we measure agency performance?

Track test velocity (tests launched per month), win rate (percentage of tests that beat control), and cumulative lift over time. Agencies showing only vanity metrics or single test wins are hiding poor overall performance. Win rate should sit at 20 to 40% for a research-driven program, which is significantly higher than the industry-average win rate of around 14% for gut-based testing. Cumulative lift over 6 to 12 months is the metric that ultimately matters, because single-test wins without compounding gains are noise.

What's the biggest red flag when evaluating agencies?

Agencies that lead with their design awards or "best practices" instead of their testing process and client results. Pretty pages that don't convert are expensive decorations. The second biggest red flag: agencies that can't articulate when they would tell a client not to invest in landing page optimization. Honesty about readiness is one of the most reliable signals of a good partner.

Can one agency handle all our landing page needs?

It depends on your channel mix and your product complexity. Agencies specializing in paid social landing pages often struggle with Amazon DSP or Google Shopping pages. Agencies strong in beauty or fashion may not have the compliance depth required for health and wellness. Ask about channel-specific experience and consider specialists for distinct funnels. At an 8 and 9-figure scale, the operational cost of running multiple agency relationships is often justified by the depth of expertise each brings to their specialty.

If you're running an 8- or 9-figure DTC brand and evaluating landing page agency partnerships, or already working with an agency but unsure whether you're getting the testing velocity, research depth, and operational discipline you should be, see how we can help.

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