Editor’s Note: This transcript was created using AI transcription and formatting tools. While we’ve reviewed it for accuracy, some errors may remain. If anything seems unclear, we recommend referring back to the episode above.
Episode Trailer
“Three apps that you can’t live without: Figma, Webflow, VWO.”
“I would recommend women to not fear getting into this industry. There are so many opportunities and it’s getting easier and easier to get into it.”
“It doesn’t matter if you know your ads are optimized or driving traffic—if your landing page doesn’t convert, it’s just—in the end, you’re not going to get the results that you want.”
“My journey has been a very hybrid one. For example, I actually got a degree in design. I did some internship in the beginning, but it wasn’t aligning with my interests and values, so I iterated and I pivoted into another domain. I went into web development design, so it has been a huge change from that, but I still have been doing design.”
“It’s very easy to expand on some subject and go overboard, but you have to be aware of your audience and the time. So yeah, be short and concise and touch upon important aspects as well.”
“The advice I would give to someone that is running an experiment is to not peek at the beginning of the experiment and freak out if the results are not as you were expecting, because in most cases the outcome is not going to be the same as you first think about it.”
“It can be a bit challenging, for example, when you’re dealing with agencies because sometimes the dynamic changes very much. Sometimes they have an internal team that you have to deal with, so sometimes we don’t align, so that can be like a friction point in that matter.”
About VWO
Welcome to another episode of the Women in CRO series by VWO podcast. This series is an ode to the contribution of women in the CRO industry.
Before we speak to our special guest for this episode, here’s a quick summary of who we are and what we do: VWO is a leading experience optimization platform that helps fast-growing brands optimize their digital experiences. Using our latest product, VWO Insights, you can understand user journeys and identify conversion roadblocks on your website and mobile apps.
So without any further delay, let’s jump right into the conversation.
Guest Introduction
Priyanka: Hi everyone, my name is Priyanka, the Priyanka of today’s podcast. I work as a CSM at VWO. Before we begin with the introduction of our guest today, I would like to thank everyone for choosing to spend your time with us.
In conversation with us, in today’s episode, we are thrilled to welcome Alexandra Semprun, the CRO lead at Pill, joining us from Spain. With an extensive experience background in CRO itself, she brings not only her seasoned expertise in the experimentation program but also her rich entrepreneurial experience.
So sit back and relax and join us in extending a warm welcome to Alexandra.
Main Interview
Webinar Preparation and Best Practices
Priyanka: Hi Alexandra, thank you very much for the invitation to be here. This is my second time I’ve done in the past, so it’s been a pleasure. I hope everything is working well for you.
Alexandra: Thank you for having me.
Priyanka: I also wanted to—this is I’ve been conducting webinars for a while now, and I used to feel slightly overwhelmed at the beginning of it. So I just wanted to understand a couple of things from you: what really—what do you do, any prep that you do before joining the webinar? If you can share any best practices, habits that you get into the right mindset?
Alexandra: For me, it works—it’s very important to compile all your high-level thoughts in a document so that you can expand further on that. So that would be my first advice: to have a direction and try to follow that, because it’s very easy to expand on some subject and go overboard. But you have to be aware of your audience and the time, so yeah, be short and concise and touch upon important aspects as well. So I think a little more organization and a little more pre-work definitely helps.
Priyanka: Yeah, for sure. All right, so I think—yeah, go ahead.
Alexandra: We’re currently preparing another webinar and I have a colleague that hasn’t been involved in this, so it will be her first webinar and she was a bit nervous in this aspect. And I told her to not be nervous at all because even if it’s your first time, you’re going to be learning how to do it and you’re going to learn from your mistakes or—yeah, I think it’s good to put yourself out there for sure. I think I also have learned a lot from each webinar, so I think it’s a great way—the more you conduct webinars, the more you read about it, the more you analyze your webinars, it’s a great chance to learn from them as well.
Priyanka: Yes, definitely. Perfect.
Career Journey and Background
Priyanka: So I think moving on to our very first segment for today’s conversation: what inspired you to take up a career in the CRO space, and how has your journey been so far?
Alexandra: My journey has been a very hybrid one. For example, I actually got a degree in design, which I didn’t—I did some internship in the beginning, but it wasn’t aligning with my interests and values, so I iterated and I pivoted into another domain. I went into web development design, so it has been a huge change from that, but I still have been doing design, UX, UI.
So this hybrid approach kind of helped me get into the CRO domain much easier because you can extrapolate a lot of learnings. And for example, when you are to implement an A/B test or even design or review designs, it’s very important to have some kind of background information, background knowledge. So that has helped me enormously.
So I would advise, for example, for a newcomer—if you’re coming from a different background, don’t fear getting into it. It’s—but yeah, you—yeah, I think…
Priyanka: What you were saying—because I remember when I started my CRO journey at the very first, it was very difficult for me to understand the background, what goes behind to create a particular hypothesis and then implement it. It’s great. I like you mentioned, since you also have diverse experience where you actually managed entire operations of backend things, I think that definitely helps to learn more about CRO.
Notable Project Achievement
Priyanka: Can you also remind us of any specific project or achievement that you are particularly proud of that you achieved?
Alexandra: Yes, one that really stands out—you know, we are at Pill, we’re a performance marketing agency, so we deal with PPC, social research, and one of our focuses is also creative optimization and CRO. And for example, for this specific project, we were working with a PPC social team, and we had a particular client that wanted to optimize their ad spend to increase—to reduce the cost per acquisition.
And we managed to decrease that cost per acquisition by, I think, 60%—it was quite dramatic—and improve the conversion rate also, like double. And the thing about it is that it was such a low-hanging fruit. For example, when you’re analyzing and doing a heuristic analysis of the landing page in question, it’s important to analyze—to go first, for example, what are the things that you can fix faster and get faster results.
So if you can identify problems that are actual problems, you can magnify your results by a lot. So in this instance, for this project, we basically reduced the friction in the conversion path. And of course, people didn’t have to navigate to another page—they had a form to fill other information, and it was a much faster approach in converting the lead than to navigate to other pages.
So yeah, but it’s also like a cumulative of practices—it’s not just looking at frictions or best practices, so you have to also identify other problems that are related to data. So it can be like a more holistic path, for sure.
Setting Client Expectations
Priyanka: I think when I started my journey, I often used to struggle with how can I set the correct expectations of my clients in the beginning. Like you mentioned that you managed to double the metrics that they intended to achieve. I also would like to learn from you: how—what’s the correct way to set up the expectations even for a beginner who just started in CRO?
Alexandra: I think you have to be very careful or very aware of your primary metrics and secondary metrics. And I mean, if you’re a beginner, you should be—I would advise that you expand your knowledge so that—there are many resources online, many courses that you can take to get better at it. For example, in my case, in the beginning I took a course, and I’m still enrolled—it’s like an active learning—and that helped me a lot in my journey.
Driving Experimentation Adoption
Priyanka: I think that completely makes sense. Any specific key pointers you feel that have worked for you to adapt the experimentation at your organization or help you to push your clients to adapt the experimentation cycle? Any key aspect that you can share with us?
Alexandra: Yes, it’s very important to educate—to have an educational aspect when you’re dealing with clients, because in some cases they would come with a brief—you know, “We want to do this and that’s okay, we think we’re going to get this outcome”—but in some cases, their approach is not optimized. So we, as professionals, we need to give our best advice to them, and if we can—we can change their opinion. But I think it’s very important to educate—this education process.
Priyanka: I remember I think the education for CRO—I think it’s the base, it’s the foundation, and then we can build on top of it.
Data Hygiene and Best Practices
Priyanka: The other challenge that I also feel in CRO is data hygiene. I think one of the biggest challenges when it comes to ensuring the data and integrity throughout the CRO process—do you have any best practices on how can we ensure we are maintaining those? Any best practices to take care of those?
Alexandra: The advice I would give to someone that is running an experiment is to not peek at the beginning of an experiment and freak out if the results are not as you were expecting, because in most cases the outcome is not going to be the same as you first think about it. So yeah—because—and let the experiment run. In some cases, you can see something—”Okay, this is very dramatic,” so it doesn’t make sense to continue the experiment, but most of the cases it’s not like that.
So I would recommend to stick to your initial hypothesis, let the experiment conclude, and then even if it fails, you can extrapolate a lot of learnings from it. So it will help your new experiments—you can iterate on that or just go with another hypothesis.
And also another aspect would be to have your quality assurance—to focus or dedicate some time to it because it’s going to minimize your errors. So that’s very important—there are many errors you can make when setting up an A/B test.
Advice for Women in CRO
Priyanka: I think like you mentioned, I believe that CRO is a constant ongoing process, so from each experiment, even if it’s inconclusive or we have a positive result, we should always go back and see if at all we can capture any learnings and then reuse in another hypothesis to optimize the entire user journey.
Any specific advice—since I believe CRO is quite a male-dominated industry, a lot of different operations are majorly male-dominated—do you have any best practices or especially for women? What kind of advice do you have for them on how they can still go ahead and stand out?
Alexandra: As I said, if you’re a newcomer, please learn, please enroll in courses because there are so many resources online and so much opportunities for growth in this arena. I mean, there are so many fields and roles that you can—it can be a CRO specialist, landing page designer, even in the no-code building part, you can be building landing pages.
So yeah, the educational aspect is very important, but also I would suggest that you feed your curiosity and also not fear, because sometimes it’s a bit hard to put your ideas forward, you know, if you have someone that is called a HiPPO or something—when you’re dealing with the highest-paid person in the room. But I think it’s important to just be fearless.
Priyanka: Because CRO is experimentation, and we are also trying out a lot of things, so it’s always better to put out and test your idea out before even you conclude on anything.
Alexandra: Yes, and what I’ve learned also is that the more variations you’re going to run, I think the better outcome you’re going to have. It’s so important—the test velocity—and also having these variations, different copy, different design, because it will amplify your chances of getting a lot more learnings, actually, even if it fails.
Managing Test Variations and Timeline
Priyanka: That’s correct. So when you mention we can also have more variations, I’ve often seen that a lot of users also have this concern that the more variations they create, the more time they would require to conclude any campaign. Do you think that’s fair, and what kind of best practices should they consider?
Alexandra: Yes, the thing is, I mean, you can go for less impact, I would say. You don’t need to spend that much time because let’s say you have a variation, you have a hypothesis, and you can create variations that are less effort. You can just change little elements, the copy, and it can inform a lot of design decisions.
So I think if you don’t have the resources, focus on creating variations that are less time-consuming but still produce results, because I think that would give you more results.
Industry Misconceptions
Priyanka: I believe since you have also worked for such a long time in the CRO industry, do you think there are any biggest misconceptions about CRO, and how do you feel that we should be overcoming that misconception?
Alexandra: Yeah, one of the misconceptions, for example, when dealing with clients, sometimes they don’t see the importance of it. Sometimes it’s left behind, especially if you’re coming from a performance marketing agency—you’re focusing on PPC, paid social and all that—but it’s so important to optimize the entire funnel and to have a landing page that’s optimized.
Because it doesn’t matter if your ads are optimized or driving traffic—if your landing page doesn’t convert, it’s just—in the end, you’re not going to get the results that you want. So it’s very important to think of CRO as an important part.
Test Duration and Statistical Significance
Priyanka: In terms of maybe other pages as well, do you think focusing on low-hanging fruit—even I’ve seen that most of the times, users or people whosoever are working on CRO, they tend to pause the test in between, within just one week’s time. So do you think that is also fair? Should they run the test for a little longer to learn more about the result? When should they conclude any test? Any thoughts on those?
Alexandra: Yes, definitely. I mean, you can take different approaches—not necessarily you can take a risk and not necessarily wait for the experiment to achieve statistical significance. You can look at it from a Bayesian approach. We normally look at, for example, if it has more than 80% probability of being a winner, sometimes we ship if you have the confidence and the data is right. So that’s—yeah.
AI Impact on CRO
Priyanka: So I think now also we have seen a lot of changes in terms of AI transforming and I think it brings our life so much easier, even with respect to ChatGPT. Do you think that envisioning AI transforming CRO will also have any impact? What kind of impact we can foresee for the CRO industry?
Alexandra: Yes, I’m thinking more in terms of how we can facilitate our work. I’m thinking more of automation—like repetitive tasks, how we can get our work faster. And also, it can be a great opportunity for discovering new aspects in user behavior, something that you might have missed. So it’s important to see how it will go in the future—it can facilitate our work a lot, I think.
Priyanka: I have also seen a lot of users now generating ideas with the AI-generated approach itself. So they just input their goals that they would like to achieve, their friction areas, and then the AI prompts with a couple of ideas. Do you have you practiced this at your end? Do you feel that we can practice this or consider approaching it through AI transformation?
Alexandra: Yeah, I think for generating ideas, it’s a very good point. We have some conflicted opinions on this. For example, in the copywriting arena, it’s a bit tricky to talk about it because a lot of copywriters don’t see this approach as very good for the industry. So I believe that, for example, at this stage, it’s not that good, but it can get better in the future.
We actually have a post about it in our blog about ChatGPT and its relation to copywriting, so that’s a very fun reading. I think it would be great reading through those articles to learn more about how, now in the future, CRO…
Female Inspiration in the Field
Priyanka: If you can also share any female personality that has inspired you in this particular field or in general, I think that would be really great.
Alexandra: I’m thinking of Luisa van den Brink, if I’m pronouncing correctly her name. I think she currently started some project—I think it’s called Women in CRO. So this project is going to give women in this field more visibility. I think it’s very valuable. So whatever project may come from existing businesses or agencies that can promote women in this arena and bring visibility in this field, I think it’s very important to bring forward and mention.
Personal Challenges and Overcoming Them
Priyanka: On that point, because I feel that it’s very important to voice out your opinions, be it anything—even if it’s like putting forward with your management helping them with the roadmap that you have structured, how can we ensure that they see value in the work that we do? Do you think—any biggest challenge that you personally have faced and you overcame when it comes to the CRO industry? Because as we know, that’s slightly predominantly male. Do you have any challenges that you can share with us?
Alexandra: Yes, it can be a bit challenging, for example, when you’re dealing with agencies, because sometimes the dynamic changes very much. Sometimes they have an internal team that you have to deal with, so sometimes we don’t align that well, so we’re trying to push what we believe is best for them. So that can be like a friction point in that matter.
And then again, dealing with the highest-paid person in the room can be challenging, but you learn a lot from these experiences—how to delegate and manage and react to these things, and how to better communicate also.
Priyanka: I couldn’t relate to it more. I personally have faced these challenges a lot, so I can definitely relate. But I think like you mentioned, eventually, when you—the more elaborate or the more easy you can put your point forward, I think it’s better for users or your management to relate to you and then try to understand your point of view as well.
Alexandra: Yes, because sometimes you have to go against their initial idea, and it can be challenging to communicate that. But I think it’s important always to try to do your best and what’s best for the business overall.
Final Wisdom and Recommendations
Priyanka: Sure, for sure, that definitely makes sense. I think thank you so much for the wonderful guidance that you shared with us. This brings us to the end of the CRO segment, but if you can also share one piece of wisdom with our listeners, what would that be?
Alexandra: Okay, I would recommend women to not fear getting into this industry because there are so many opportunities and it’s getting easier and easier to get into it because of the resources, courses, and all the information available.
Priyanka: Any particular courses, reading material that you would recommend?
Alexandra: Yes, I would highly recommend CXL.com. They have a plethora of courses, mini degrees in CRO, experimentation, A/B testing, and landing pages. So I think it’s a great starting point from there.
And also, if you can—I would suggest, I would recommend, if you don’t have, for example, in your company, I would recommend asking for an education stipend so you can grow every year. For example, we have that in our company, and it’s my favorite thing.
And also, I would recommend attending conferences because you can network and learn a lot from the professionals in this field.
Women’s Day Celebration
Priyanka: I think since we are talking a lot about women, I would definitely love to understand or learn how do you usually celebrate Women’s Day? Any particular thing that you would like to do on Women’s Day to treat yourself?
Alexandra: I might maybe go traveling, just go outside, do something nice for yourself. I was thinking for myself just traveling around the Basque country—I live close to Spain, close to France. Beautiful. Take time for yourself, for sure.
Priyanka: I think I really would want to visit Spain. I am planning to visit Turkey early this year.
Alexandra: You should definitely come to Spain. Please come to Northern Spain—best country. We have the best food there. The view is incredible.
Priyanka: I’ve heard a lot of it. I cannot be more eager to visit it very soon and definitely take itineraries from you.
Alexandra: Yeah, we’ll keep in touch for sure.
Rapid Fire Round
Priyanka: I think now I have a surprise segment for you, which is like a rapid fire where you have to answer questions rapidly. So are you ready for the fun round?
Alexandra: Perfect.
Q: If you can help us learn three apps that you can’t live without? A: Figma, Webflow, VWO.
Priyanka: And any social apps in general, in person, that you really like, like apart from the digital apps, the work apps?
Alexandra: LinkedIn is a good one. I recently started being more active there, so I think it’s a great opportunity to be more present there. And in terms of meditation, I use the Calm app.
Q: If a movie was made about your life, what would the title be? A: How to have hybrid roles and not burn in the process.
Priyanka: Very relatable, I must say. Very dramatic, for sure.
Q: One thing that you would like to change about the CRO industry? A: I would like the inclusivity aspect—bringing more diversity, for example, making it easier for persons that want to get into this field. So lowering the entry level—a lot of businesses can make it easier for people like providing internships, mentorship, and all that. So that would be very valuable.
Q: Any guilty pleasure TV show that you are following now? A: I think I’ve seen Fleabag—it’s a TV series on Prime, I think. I watched it all the time. It’s really good.
Priyanka: I think I’ve been following a lot of Indian language stuff for a while now, but I am definitely going to look at that.
Alexandra: It’s very funny, very good humor. I will definitely look at that.
Q: Any three books that you would like to recommend to our listeners, be it CRO or non-CRO? A: I would recommend books related to A/B testing, experimentation. There’s one—I don’t remember the name, but I think it’s very common in this field. And then any other book that touches on user experience or UI/UX design. I think it’s very valuable.
Q: If you had a chance to podcast, who is the first person that you would invite on your show? A: I think I would have a conversation with Luisa van den Brink, or the Queen of CRO—I don’t remember her name, but this is what she’s called.
Q: What is the one superpower that you would like to have? A: Maybe being able to move from city to city faster, more easily. But I don’t know, in Spain you can still move faster—even you can cross countries more faster than what we can in India, so I think you have good infrastructure and fast trains here.
Q: One thing you’re tired of explaining to your boss but then it just skipped out of their mind? A: I’m going to tell you something a bit in reverse, because we have quarterly goals in our company, and I’m proposing actually to get to take an experimentation certificate. And the certificate was very—it had many modules, it wasn’t organized or anything, so I would have to basically compile all the information and do a lot of work. And my boss—one of the stakeholders told me, “Why don’t you take the exam just without studying, just to see how it goes?” And I didn’t think of it because I’m a bit structured—I wanted to succeed. But I think it’s important to maybe take the shorter approach or just be a bit bolder in that sense.
Q: Any one goal or dream that you want to achieve in the next three years? A: I would like to be able to travel more and explore more cities because it’s so great to meet new people and new cultures. And if you have the opportunity to do it, I really love to do that.
Closing
Priyanka: I’m must say the last segment was filled with a lot of fun and a lot of insights from your personal life as well, and it was really great to know that. Once again, I really thank you for joining us today and our listeners for choosing this podcast. I hope we get a chance to connect and share our knowledge frequently, and I think I’m sure that we will be in touch on LinkedIn. So if at all I wish to intend to learn more about CRO—because I’m also learning new things about CRO—I’m looking forward to learning from you and growing from you from here.
Alexandra: Thank you very much, Priyanka. Let’s stay in touch for sure.
Priyanka: No worries. You have a lovely day ahead, and I’ll talk very soon, and we’ll keep in touch.
Alexandra: You too.
