CRO Manager

Use the CRO Manager in Optimizely Opal to run your Optimizely Web Experimentation program end to end, from finding test ideas to calling results. It runs on its own between sessions and keeps you in control of what goes live.

What the CRO Manager does

The CRO Manager includes the following jobs:

• Ideate experiments – Scans conversion trends, crawls your target pages for friction, and benchmarks competitors. It scores each hypothesis with the potential, importance, and ease (PIE) framework and ranks your roadmap by impact.
• Design experiments – Pulls traffic baselines and calculates the required sample size and runtime for each approved hypothesis. It builds a complete test plan with variation wireframes before anything enters Web Experimentation.
• Build experiments – Parses the approved test plan, assigns audiences and metrics, and sets traffic distribution. It applies variation edits in the Visual Editor and saves them as a draft for your final review.
• Monitor experiment health – Runs daily checks across your active experiments. It flags sample ratio mismatch (SRM) errors and surfaces statistically significant results when they are ready to call. It detects tracking breaks from zero-conversion signals, and alerts you when runtime exceeds the plan.
• Surface experiment insights – Reviews the results, delivers a clear verdict on whether it won, lost, or was inconclusive with the reasoning behind it when a test concludes. It drafts a stakeholder email and stores each insight to inform future tests.

Each job is a workflow agent that performs on a schedule or trigger. Opal displays only the jobs an administrator turns on for your organization.

What the CRO Manager needs

Connect the following tools so the CRO Manager has the information it needs:

• Google Analytics 4 (GA4) – Reads conversion trends and traffic baselines to find and size experiments.
• Web Experimentation – Builds variations, sets traffic distribution, monitors experiment health, and applies the Decision Policy.

Opal displays only the tools an administrator connects for your organization.

How you receive its work

The CRO Manager delivers its work to you in a message. You receive prioritized test ideas, test plans, health alerts, and end-of-test verdicts. It saves each experiment as a draft in Web Experimentation for your review before launch. It also drafts stakeholder emails for you to send.

See Optimizely Opal Instant Messaging overview.

Configure the CRO Manager

An Opal administrator enables the CRO Manager for your organization. You then name and configure your own. For the full steps, see Hire a Virtual Teammate.

Connect Web Experimentation and your web analytics during configuration, so the responsibilities have the data they need from the first run.