Testing Mind Map Series: How to Think Like a CRO Pro (Part 65)

Interview with Cristina Giorgetti

Every couple of weeks, we get up close and personal with some of the brightest minds in the CRO and experimentation community.

We’re on a mission to discover what lies behind their success. Get real answers to your toughest questions. Share hidden gems and unique insights you won’t find in the books. Condense years of real-world experience into actionable tactics and strategies.

This week, we’re chatting with Cristina Giorgetti, a CXL certified optimizer and Senior CRO Specialist at MOCA Interactive, an Italian performance marketing agency. MOCA supports companies at every stage of their online growth journey, offering an integrated approach that begins with increasing visibility and traffic, and extends to creating optimized digital properties for a smooth and effective user experience.

Cristina, tell us about yourself. What inspired you to get into testing & optimization?

It was by chance that I entered the world of testing and optimization. I started working in 2018, after studying Economics, at a company where I held various marketing roles, but I hadn’t found my passion. In 2020, I decided to change jobs and moved to Milan to work in CRO, without knowing much about it. In the beginning, my best friends were GA, Adobe Analytics, and Excel (I did a lot of UX analytics!). Gradually, I discovered the many facets of this methodology and eventually got into testing, where I realized it was time to start studying again!

How many years have you been testing for?

I started testing about 3 years ago, after initially focusing on UX analytics and direct optimization.

What’s the one resource you recommend to aspiring testers & optimizers?

It may be obvious, but the resource I recommend to aspiring testers and optimizers is the Conversion Optimization Minidegree from CXL. I found many insights in this course even though I took it this year, after 5 years of working in CRO, to find new ideas and inspiration. On a practical level, my advice is to start practicing this discipline in an agency where you have the opportunity to work with different types of clients. This allows you to learn quickly but, more importantly, to fully understand how flexible this methodology is.

Answer in 5 words or less: What is the discipline of optimization to you?

Connecting data with human psychology.

What are the top 3 things people MUST understand before they start optimizing?

Be curious: It’s essential to start with the users and analyze how they interact with digital environments. Be curious enough to go deep into analytics data, sometimes to discover nothing and sometimes to discover the insight you were (or weren’t) looking for!

Talk to your customers: How is it possible to know how to talk to your customers if you’ve never spoken to them? Surveys, feedback, and interviews are fundamental tools to understand this!

Abandon opinions: “I think this should be done this way” is a phrase we can only use when cooking with our partner and wanting to convince them that our recipe is the best. Being “critical” in observing a website doesn’t mean working based on gut feeling! What supports us in this case? Theory, best practices, experience, and tests!

How do you treat qualitative & quantitative data to minimize bias?

The best way to avoid bias when looking at qualitative and quantitative data is not to go in with a strong idea of what the problem might be and wanting to find that problem at all costs. Sure, it’s useful to start with a heuristic pre-analysis that guides us towards the qualitative-quantitative study of the data, but it’s also important to let ourselves be surprised by the data and set aside initial convictions. Remember the Confirmation Bias: “People have a tendency to test things that confirm their beliefs.”

How (to you) is experimentation different from CRO?

To me, experimentation is part of the Conversion Rate Optimization process. CRO starts with the analysis and study of a digital property to identify ideas aimed at improving its performance. Some of these ideas are the so-called quick wins, i.e., high-confidence optimization ideas that are implemented directly, while others translate into hypotheses. This is where the experimentation approach comes into play, which is used to validate or reject hypotheses.

Talk to us about some of the unique experiments you’ve run over the years.

I’d like to talk about a couple of experiments I launched this year in a fashion ecommerce, one positive and one negative:

• Positive result test: I tested the inclusion of more detailed shipping information in the cart and minicart. Specifically, the new element included a small shipping truck icon and copy that specified the date by which the product would arrive. The tested variant showed positive (and statistically significant) impacts not only on the CTR towards checkout but also on the CR.
• Negative result test: During the sales period, I tested the inclusion of a checkbox on the PLP, right before the product listing, to quickly filter the sale products from the list. Unexpectedly, contrary to what I believed, the variant led to a downlift in both add-to-cart and CR compared to the control.

Cheers for reading! If you’ve caught the CRO bug… you’re in good company here. Be sure to check back often, we have fresh interviews dropping twice a month.

And if you’re in the mood for a binge read, have a gander at our earlier interviews with Gursimran Gujral, Haley Carpenter, Rishi Rawat, Sina Fak, Eden Bidani, Jakub Linowski, Shiva Manjunath, Deborah O’Malley, Andra Baragan, Rich Page, Ruben de Boer, Abi Hough, Alex Birkett, John Ostrowski, Ryan Levander, Ryan Thomas, Bhavik Patel, Siobhan Solberg, Tim Mehta, Rommil Santiago, Steph Le Prevost, Nils Koppelmann, Danielle Schwolow, Kevin Szpak, Marianne Stjernvall, Christoph Böcker, Max Bradley, Samuel Hess, Riccardo Vandra, Lukas Petrauskas, Gabriela Florea, Sean Clanchy, Ryan Webb, Tracy Laranjo, Lucia van den Brink, LeAnn Reyes, Lucrezia Platé, Daniel Jones, May Chin, Kyle Hearnshaw, Gerda Vogt-Thomas, Melanie Kyrklund, Sahil Patel, Lucas Vos, David Sanchez del Real, Oliver Kenyon, David Stepien, Maria Luiza de Lange, Callum Dreniw, Shirley Lee, Rúben Marinheiro, Lorik Mullaademi, Sergio Simarro Villalba, Georgiana Hunter-Cozens, Asmir Muminovic, Edd Saunders, Marc Uitterhoeve, Zander Aycock, Eduardo Marconi Pinheiro Lima, Linda Bustos, Marouscha Dorenbos, Cristina Molina, Tim Donets, and Jarrah Hemmant.