Rarely — the lowest hit rate here. Body copy changes win 6% of the time, the lowest published rate here, and 80% produce no measurable difference at all.
The weakest bet in this benchmark by hit rate: body copy wins less often than any other change type. If you are testing body copy because you cannot think of anything else to test, that is worth noticing.
| Tests analysed | 250+ |
| Beat control | 6% |
| No measurable difference | 80% |
| Lost to control | 13% |
| Median lift when it won | +22.8% |
Typical winning range: +11.2% to +81.5% for the middle half of winners. Median traffic per variant was 1372 visitors. Most ran on product pages (109), homepages (100), landing pages (29).
Supporting paragraph text is rewritten, shortened or expanded. Headings, images and CTAs are untouched.
Adjacent categories, and how often they win: layout (15%), hero image (12%), styling (11%).
| page type | win rate | tests |
|---|---|---|
| product pages | 7% | 100+ |
| homepages | 8% | 100+ |
Only page types with at least 30 body copy tests appear here.
The original paragraph text was hidden and replaced with a bulleted feature list that used checkmarks and highlighted sub-copy.
The product top-tag labels in the itinerary widget and booking modal were replaced with a bestseller label.
The popup message text and link wording were changed, and the link background color was darkened.
The body copy changed from general assessment and booking prompts into guidance that helped visitors choose a program and sent new and returning customers to different booking channels.
The page added step-by-step booking guidance with headings for swim assessment and ready-to-book sections, and it included separate instructions for new and returning customers.
The welcome message text was replaced with a personalized greeting that included the user's name.
The disclaimer text was rewritten to add a disclosure that the brand was a private company, not a government agency.
The first navigation menu item label changed from its previous wording to a category name on mobile and desktop.
The subheadline text was replaced, and the five feature and benefit bullet lines below it were rewritten.
These are individual tests, not rules. Each ran on one site, with one audience, against one page we are not showing you. They are picked to be illustrative rather than sampled at random, and a change that won here can lose on your page for reasons none of this captures. Read them as prompts for what to test, not as findings to copy.
Body copy sits below the elements people actually read, and it is read by the smallest share of visitors of anything on the page. A change that most of your traffic never sees cannot move most of your traffic.
| change type | win rate | tests |
|---|---|---|
| CTA colour | 16% | 32 |
| Layout | 15% | 351 |
| Form | 12% | 81 |
| CTA copy | 12% | 315 |
| Hero image | 12% | 160 |
| Price framing | 11% | 117 |
| Styling | 11% | 1414 |
| Split URL | 10% | 1165 |
| Headline | 8% | 918 |
| Social proof | 8% | 196 |
| Body copy (this page) | 6% | 337 |
A win rate only means as much as the thing being counted, so this is what these tests were actually optimising for.
| measured outcome | share of tests |
|---|---|
| Purchase / order complete | 47% |
| Signup / registration | 20% |
| Lead / form submission | 7% |
| On-page click / engagement | 6% |
Outcomes below 5% of the set are not listed, so these do not sum to 100. How the outcome was measured moves the win rate a lot — see the methodology.
These rates are not like-for-like. How often a test wins depends partly on what it chose to measure: a goal that records a soft signal — a click, a scroll — clears the bar more often than one that records a purchase. Across this data, tests measured against a proxy goal win 13%, against 9% for tests measured against a business outcome.
Categories differ a lot in that mix — proxy goals account for anywhere from 2% to 41% of a category's tests, and body copy tests sit at 13%.
Hold the metric fixed and the spread narrows sharply. Comparing only tests measured against a business outcome, body copy wins 6% (3–11%) rather than 6%, and the gap between the highest and lowest category falls from 9 points to 6 — at which point the intervals overlap and the categories are not statistically distinguishable.
So read the table as a description of what happened, not as a ranking of what works. If you want the comparison to mean something, compare categories that were measured the same way. The methodology page has the full breakdown.
Both appear among the winners and the failures here. Length is not the variable this data can settle.
Headline copy sits at a similar published rate. The pattern across both is that copy changes trail position and visual changes, though how much of that is the change and how much is the metric chosen is not settled.
This is every Mida account that ran a readable test — in-house marketers, founders, product teams, and agencies working on client sites. Nothing here is filtered by who ran the experiment or how experienced they are.
Low win rates are normal in experimentation, including at the top end. Microsoft's experimentation team, reporting on its own platform, found that only about one third of ideas improve the metric they were designed to improve — and that roughly another third actively hurt it. That is a dedicated experimentation organisation with research, prioritisation and review behind every test.
A mixed population like this one runs below that. The gap is roughly what disciplined practice buys you: ideas grounded in research rather than opinion, one variable at a time, and tests built so the result can actually be read.
So treat these as a general base rate, not a target. If you would rather not close that gap the slow way, find a CRO agency in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands or Australia — or browse every region.
A win is a variant that beat its control on that test's primary goal with a statistically significant result. Tests that never got enough traffic to say anything either way are excluded. The methodology has the full detail, including what these numbers cannot tell you.
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