21 Conversion Rate Optimization Experts to Follow in 2026
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a data-driven approach to increase conversions and increase sales without letting customer acquisition costs creep up. It’s a crucial aspect of business growth now that businesses operate online in a crowded digital world.
CRO works when you treat it like a system, not a one-time tweak. You study visitor behavior and user engagement, then use Google Analytics and careful data analysis to spot where potential customers drop off. After that, you improve the key elements that drive customer engagement, high-converting landing pages, website performance, and mobile optimization. The goal is simple, maximize conversion rates and build customer loyalty.
This guide rounds up 21 conversion rate optimization experts to follow in 2026. Pull valuable insights from their work, and borrow their scientific methods and data-driven strategies so you can get more conversions and more sales without guessing.
Conversion rate optimization experts at a glance
Sergiu Cazac
Neil Patel
Oli Gardner
Michael Aagaard
Alex Birkett
Linda Bustos
John Ekman
Talia Wolf
Sean Ellis
Joanna Wiebe
Scott Brinker
Peep Laja
Chris Goward
Karl Gilis
Craig Sullivan
Bryan Eisenberg
Brian Massey
Tim Ash
Roger Dooley
Stephen Pavlovich
Ton Wesseling
1. Sergiu Cazac
Sergiu Cazac is a product builder and entrepreneur based in Chișinău, Moldova. He's the founder and CEO of Personizely since May 2018. He has also said he has been building on the web since 2007, which matches the “builder-first” tone of his content.
What he does in CRO is practical and tool-driven. Personizely positions itself as an all-in-one CRO suite that combines A/B testing, website personalization, and on-site widgets such as pop-ups and bars. So when you follow him, you’re seeing CRO through the lens of someone shipping features that e-commerce teams use daily, page tests, offer targeting, segmentation, and campaign widgets that are meant to lift revenue.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiucazac/
2. Neil Patel
Neil Patel is a digital marketer and entrepreneur best known for building marketing products and publishing tactical content that teams can actually use. He co-founded companies such as Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics, and he runs the marketing agency NP Digital while also growing Ubersuggest.
His work connects digital marketing with search engine optimization, search engine strategies, and content marketing, then ties those marketing efforts back to conversion rates and customer acquisition costs.
If you follow him as a marketing optimization expert, you’ll see a numbers-first approach to landing page performance, funnels, and the messaging that turns search intent into signups, lead generation, and sales.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilkpatel
3. Oli Gardner
He’s best known as a co-founder of Unbounce, and for being one of the loudest voices on landing pages, campaign intent, and why “send traffic to a homepage” usually wastes money. Also, he's good at calling out how to keep pages conversion-first while still creating visually appealing layouts that match intent.
His CRO angle is conversion-centered design, copy and page structure that match the click intent, then using testing and iteration to improve results without guessing. He’s also a regular conference speaker, and his material tends to be blunt and very usable for marketers who ship landing pages for a living.
More recently, his own site notes that he launched Outline and focuses on B2B SaaS marketing and product work alongside speaking and optimization consulting.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oligardner/
4. Michael Aagaard
Michael Aagaard is a CRO consultant and speaker who’s been working full-time on conversion optimization since 2008. He became widely known through ContentVerve, where he published case studies and lessons that connect research, psychology, and copy to measurable lifts.
He also spent years at Unbounce as a Senior Conversion Optimizer, which shaped a lot of his public teaching around landing pages, hypothesis quality, and running clean experiments. His current positioning is as a senior CRO consultant, plus keynote speaker and public speaking coach.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michalaagaard/
5. Alex Birkett
Alex Birkett is a growth marketer who built his reputation by writing clearly about experimentation, measurement, and running tests that don't waste time. On LinkedIn, he describes himself as the co-founder of Omniscient Digital, an organic growth agency.
Much of his CRO material sits in the “program” layer, including how to set up experiments, select hypotheses, avoid bad metrics, and maintain a testing cadence when the org gets messy. His own site has long posts on A/B testing and experimentation strategy, written in a practical way that makes it easier to apply to B2B and SaaS funnels.
He has also written that he previously worked on growth and experimentation at Workato, HubSpot, and CXL, which explains why he’s focused on process and measurement, not just landing page tweaks.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamalexbirkett/
6. Linda Bustos
Linda Bustos is an e-commerce UX and conversion specialist who has spent years studying what makes online stores easier to use and easier to buy from. She has covered e-commerce and digital marketing since 2007, and she became widely known through her work on the Get Elastic e-commerce blog and related research-driven writing.
Her work leans into practical e-commerce CRO, ecommerce optimization, product discovery, merchandising, product pages, and checkout flow. A lot of what she shares ties back to visitor behavior and customer engagement, which is why her ideas translate well into tests that improve conversion rates.
In recent years, she has built Ecom Ideas, a curated database of e-commerce UX and optimization ideas that teams use for inspiration and testing roadmaps. If you want examples that help you create delightful shopping experiences and get more conversions from the same traffic, she is a strong follow.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindabustos/
7. John Ekman
John Ekman is a Swedish CRO and experimentation leader who founded Conversionista, a consultancy known in the Nordics for conversion, UX, and testing work.
He is also one of the organizers and on-stage hosts of Conversion Jam (CJAM), a recurring event in Stockholm that brings together CRO and experimentation practitioners.
His angle is practical and business-outcome driven. He tends to talk about how teams build a working experimentation program, how to connect UX with results, and lately, how AI changes the way experiments get planned and shipped.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnekman/
8. Talia Wolf
She’s a CRO strategist and trainer known for pushing “emotional targeting,” meaning she starts with what people feel, fear, and want, then turns that into clearer messaging, page structure, and experiments that actually move conversion.
She’s the founder and CEO of GetUplift, where her team works on funnel optimization and customer-first experimentation for growth-focused brands.
She also writes and teaches her framework in products like her “Emotional Targeting” book and related trainings.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taliagw/
9. Sean Ellis
Sean Ellis is a growth and experimentation leader who coined the term “growth hacking,” and helped popularize the idea that growth should run like a product team, with rapid tests tied to clear metrics.
He is the founder of GrowthHackers, and he has worked on early growth roles at companies like Dropbox and LogMeIn, which is why a lot of his advice feels very practical for teams trying to find product-market fit, improve activation, and scale acquisition without guesswork.
He co-authored “Hacking Growth,” and his writing tends to connect conversion work to the full funnel, especially activation and retention, not just landing page tweaks.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanellis/
10. Joanna Wiebe
Joanna Wiebe is a conversion copywriter and the creator of Copyhackers. She’s known for treating copy as an optimization lever, where the words do real work, they set expectation, reduce doubt, and move someone to the next step.
Before Copyhackers, she wrote copy inside tech companies and then moved into conversion-focused work for high-growth brands. A lot of her reputation comes from making copywriting feel testable, with voice-of-customer research, clear hypotheses, and messaging that matches what people actually care about.
Copyhackers is her platform for training and resources. It’s where she teaches frameworks and systems for landing pages, emails, onboarding, and pricing pages, usually with a strong focus on what to test and how to write variants that are meaningfully different.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwiebe/
11. Scott Brinker
Scott Brinker is a marketing technology entrepreneur best known for mapping the martech space and explaining how modern teams actually run marketing with software. He has served as VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, working on partner and integration ecosystems.
He’s also the founder and editor of the Chief Marketing Technologist blog, better known as chiefmartec.com. That site is where he publishes the famous “martech landscape” graphic and writes about how marketing, technology, and management collide in real companies.
For a CRO reader, his value is the stack side of the job. If your conversion work depends on analytics, experimentation platforms, attribution, and workflow, his perspective helps you connect tools to process and results. He also wrote Hacking Marketing, which pushes agile-style operating habits inside marketing teams.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjbrinker/
12. Peep Laja
Peep Laja is a CRO and experimentation veteran who built his reputation by being aggressively evidence-driven. He founded CXL, and a lot of people know him through CXL’s content and training.He also founded Speero, which started as a CRO agency and has stayed focused on research, analytics, and experimentation programs that change revenue, not just page tweaks.
In the last few years his public work has leaned harder into B2B positioning and messaging research. He’s the CEO at Wynter, a platform that helps teams test messaging with target customers, then turn what they learn into better pages and better offers. His content pushes for data driven conversions, meaning you change messaging and UX only after you can prove impact.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peeplaja/
13. Chris Goward
He built WiderFunnel into one of the better-known experimentation and conversion optimization agencies, then later exited the business. He writes about how to run an experimentation program that produces reliable business wins, not random tests.
A lot of people first found him through his book You Should Test That!, which focuses on building a testing strategy, choosing hypotheses, and making optimization a repeatable habit inside a company.
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/cgoward/
14. Karl Gilis
Karl is a Belgian UX and CRO consultant who’s been optimizing websites since the early 2000s, with a strong bias toward user research and evidence over opinions. He is one of the co-founders of AGConsult, a consultancy that focuses on usability, customer experience, and conversion improvement through research, audits, and experimentation.
He's also widely known as an international keynote speaker, his talks are usually blunt, funny, and very practical, and they tend to push teams to stop “guessing” and start validating what real users do.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/webusability/
15. Craig Sullivan
Craig is a CRO and experimentation consultant who mixes UX, analytics, and A/B testing. He’s worked in optimization for about two decades, and he’s known for being very practical about what teams should test, what evidence counts, and how to get experiments shipped without drama.
A lot of his public identity is tied to “Optimise Or Die,” which he uses across social media and writing. He writes about conversion optimization, usability, testing, analytics, and how teams can build a steady experimentation habit instead of doing one-off tests.
If you follow him, you’ll see a steady stream of takes on how to diagnose friction, how to prioritize experiments, and how to talk about optimization in a way that stakeholders accept. He also shows up a lot as a speaker and trainer in the experimentation community.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigsullivan/
16. Bryan Eisenberg
Bryan Eisenberg is a marketer, speaker, and author who has been in the CRO world for a long time. He is best known for pushing teams to treat conversion as a mix of customer psychology, clear messaging, and measurable behavior, not button color debates.
He co-authored books that shaped early CRO thinking, including “Call to Action,” “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?,” and “Always Be Testing.” If you like frameworks that help you pick better test ideas and explain them to stakeholders, his work fits.
These days, he is tied to BuyerLegends, and he has also been involved with other startups and advisory work. His angle tends to be story, persona, and decision-making, then backing that up with analytics and experimentation.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryaneisenberg/
17. Brian Massey
Brian Massey is a CRO practitioner who calls himself “The Conversion Scientist.” He runs Conversion Sciences and has spent years helping teams improve lead gen and sales by combining analytics, user behavior cues, and controlled testing.
He’s a good follow if you like practical experimentation thinking. He talks a lot about how to form test hypotheses that have a real business reason behind them, how to diagnose friction on key pages, and how to keep teams honest about what the data actually says.
He also wrote Your Customer Creation Equation, which lays out a structured way to map your site to the business model you’re running, then improve each step with tests and measurement.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bmassey/
18. Tim Ash
Tim Ash is a long-time CRO practitioner best known for landing page testing and persuasion-driven optimization. He co-founded SiteTuners, and he has spent years advising teams on how to diagnose friction, rewrite the page story, and build test plans that have a real shot at lifting revenue.
A lot of people also know him as the author of Landing Page Optimization, which is one of the more referenced books on practical landing page CRO and testing.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/primaltim/
19. Roger Dooley
Roger is a marketing writer and keynote speaker who pulls ideas from behavioral science and neuroscience, then turns them into practical guidance for selling and designing better customer experiences. He’s been running his Neuromarketing site since 2005, and he uses it to translate research into things you can actually apply to landing pages, pricing, offers, and customer journeys.
In CRO terms, his lane is decision-making. He talks a lot about “friction,” meaning the small bits of effort, doubt, or confusion that slow people down, and he pushes teams to remove that friction in the copy, the flow, and the product experience. That’s also the core idea in Friction, and it shows up constantly in his talks and writing.
He’s also the author of Brainfluence, and he publishes work as a contributor at Forbes. His personal site also lists a newer title, The Persuasion Engine, published by John Wiley & Sons.
Follow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dooley/
20. Stephen Pavlovich
He’s the founder of Conversion, a long-running experimentation and CRO agency that started in 2007 and later became part of the combined Conversion group (with WiderFunnel).
Stephen’s work is mostly about building experimentation programs that keep shipping. He talks a lot about prioritization, hypothesis quality, and how to make tests repeatable across teams, not just “run a few A/B tests and hope.”
If you follow him, you’ll see a mix of program-level thinking (how to run experiments at scale) and real case-study style posts.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenpavlovich/
21. Ton Wesseling
Ton Wesseling is an experimentation coach who has worked in conversion optimization since the late 1990s, and he is best known for treating CRO as an evidence discipline, not a design debate. He founded the experimentation agency Online Dialogue, then later moved into coaching and advising teams on how to run experimentation well inside an organization.
A lot of his impact comes from community-building. He hosts industry events like Conversion Hotel and Experimentation Island, and he has pushed the idea that “experimentation culture” is the real lever, because it changes how teams choose ideas, measure outcomes, and learn.
If you follow him, you’ll see content about validation and decision-making, what counts as good evidence, and how to scale testing without breaking trust in the results. He also teaches on well-known training platforms, including an A/B testing course with CXL.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonwesseling/
Turn follows into better tests
The experts on this list don’t just talk about conversion rate optimization; they run it in different ways. Some start with emotion and conversion copywriting. Others start with web analytics, customer insights, and user behavior to build a solid CRO strategy.
This list gives you people to follow, and a steady stream of fresh, valuable insights you can apply to your online business. You’ll see how they diagnose issues on a landing page, how they frame hypotheses, and how they explain changes in conversion rates using data-driven insights.
But ideas aren’t enough. As your business grows, you need tools that let you move fast without breaking things. With Personizely, you can run A/B tests, launch personalization, and add on-site widgets in a seamless setup that doesn’t slow you down. Start with one test this week, ship it, learn from it, then boost conversions with the next iteration. Sign up for a free trial.
Frequently asked questions
Hire conversion optimization services when you’ve hit a plateau and need a conversion optimization expert to audit funnels, fix sales processes, and build a repeatable plan. Look for CRO services with a proven track record, clear deliverables, and someone senior who is accountable, often a managing partner or chief optimizer.
