Less often than almost anything else. Headline tests win 10% of the time, near the bottom of the table, and 79% produce no measurable difference at all. They are also the second-most-run category, which is the gap worth noticing.
The most-recommended tactic in conversion optimisation has the worst hit rate in our data. Not worthless, just badly over-recommended relative to what it returns.
| Tests analysed | 500+ |
| Beat control | 10% |
| No measurable difference | 79% |
| Lost to control | 11% |
| Median lift when it won | +17.2% |
Typical winning range: +10.7% to +42.4% for the middle half of winners. Median traffic per variant was 1103 visitors. Most ran on homepages (395), landing pages (159), product pages (153).
The main heading is rewritten. Structure, styling and every other element stay put.
Adjacent categories, and how often they win: layout (19%), hero image (17%), styling (15%).
| page type | win rate | tests |
|---|---|---|
| homepages | 10% | 250+ |
| landing pages | 6% | 100+ |
| product pages | 18% | 100+ |
| lead capture pages | 11% | 50+ |
| content pages | 6% | 50+ |
Only page types with at least 30 headline tests appear here.
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.
A headline rewrite is a small intervention wearing important clothes. It feels central because it is at the top, but it changes only what one line says to people who were going to read that line anyway. Position and visual changes alter what people see at all, which is a bigger lever.
| change type | win rate | tests |
|---|---|---|
| Layout | 19% | 351 |
| Hero image | 17% | 160 |
| Form | 16% | 81 |
| CTA colour | 16% | 32 |
| Styling | 15% | 1414 |
| Price framing | 13% | 117 |
| CTA copy | 12% | 315 |
| Body copy | 11% | 337 |
| Split URL | 11% | 1164 |
| Headline (this page) | 10% | 918 |
| Social proof | 9% | 196 |
It is cheap to produce, easy to explain, and the occasional big win is memorable while 79% flat results are not. Aggregate data is the only way to see the denominator.
Neither, on this data. Winners and failures both contain long and short rewrites.
On these numbers, layout at 19% or hero image at 17% on the same page.
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.
Mida.so is a super lightweight A/B testing tool to help you experiment, analyze and implement conversion strategies in minutes.
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