The impact of COVID-19 on CRO

What should you pay attention to and which opportunites could arise?

The corona virus has an increasingly visible impack on e-commerce, especially when dealing with something like plane tickets. This made me think about the impact this could have on A/B tests. To be able to test properly you need a sample size that's representative of all of your visitors.

Imagine if the sample size is not the problem, because you're certain you can fulfill that requirement. Have you thought about how the visitors in your current tests are feeling at the moment? Could these feelings have any effect on your test results? These feelings are very likely to be temporary, so the results from the tests might not be applicable for long term usage.

What I'm trying to tell you is that you should be aware of this situation, because the test results you receive could still be "false positive" results.

What can you do?

1. Check how the corona virus is impacting your company specifically.
2. Ask yourself whether you should continue testing or stop.
3. This is a unique chance to see how your visitors behave in a situation like this, gather all the data you can.
4. If you have a product that's greatly impacted by the corona virus, check if you can run tests in areas where you normally don't get enough traffic (ex. cancellation page).
5. Think about ways to turn this bad situation into something positive.
6. Focus on things like making cancelling a trip easier. There will be a lot of stress among your visitors, because they have to cancel their trip. Instead of focusing on getting new customers, focus on converting your customers into returning customers.

I'm very interested to find out what your opinions are on this and how you deal with this situation.