More often than changing the words next to them. Swapping the main visual wins 12% of the time, around the middle of the pack. The hero is the first thing anyone sees, so replacing it changes the whole first impression rather than one line of it.
The hero is the first thing anyone sees, so replacing it changes the whole first impression rather than one line of it.
| Tests analysed | 100+ |
| Beat control | 12% |
| No measurable difference | 70% |
| Lost to control | 18% |
| Median lift when it won | +20.2% |
Typical winning range: +12% to +40% for the middle half of winners. Median traffic per variant was 1601 visitors. Most ran on homepages (68), product pages (27), landing pages (24).
The main visual is swapped, cropped or replaced. Surrounding copy stays as it was.
Adjacent categories, and how often they win: layout (15%), styling (11%), CTA copy (12%).
| page type | win rate | tests |
|---|---|---|
| homepages | 15% | 50+ |
Only page types with at least 30 hero image tests appear here.
The hero image changed from an embedded map to a staff photo at the storefront.
The image inside the specified block was replaced with a different photo.
The homepage hero area changed from a static section to a new autoplaying background video with a headline, text, and a CTA button above the main content.
The hero video source and poster image were swapped from one language version to another, while the surrounding content stayed the same.
The plain text headline and static screenshot hero were replaced with an illustrated mind-map graphic and a new translated headline.
It replaced the desktop and mobile hero images with new versions and reduced the top margin above the hero graphic on mobile.
The hero banner image changed from a mother and son hugging to a different photo of a family on a muddy walk, while the layout and cropping stayed the same.
It added a new hero section with three linked promotional images above the page content and hid the existing banner wrapper.
The static hero banner image was replaced with an autoplaying, looping, muted background video.
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 visitor forms an impression of the page before reading it. The hero image is most of that impression, which gives an image swap more room to move behaviour than a headline rewrite in the same position.
| change type | win rate | tests |
|---|---|---|
| CTA colour | 16% | 32 |
| Layout | 15% | 351 |
| Form | 12% | 81 |
| CTA copy | 12% | 315 |
| Hero image (this page) | 12% | 160 |
| Price framing | 11% | 117 |
| Styling | 11% | 1414 |
| Split URL | 10% | 1165 |
| Headline | 8% | 918 |
| Social proof | 8% | 196 |
| Body copy | 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 | 46% |
| On-page click / engagement | 15% |
| Signup / registration | 14% |
| Lead / form submission | 11% |
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 hero image tests sit at 25%.
Hold the metric fixed and the spread narrows sharply. Comparing only tests measured against a business outcome, hero image wins 9% (4–20%) rather than 12%, 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.
Our data does not answer this. The winners in this set moved in different directions on different sites, and there is no general rule in them.
Yes, where the background is the page's main visual. A decorative texture change is a styling test instead.
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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