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Do layout A/B tests work on category pages?

About the same as anywhere else. Layout tests win 12% of the time on category pages, against 15% across all page types. This page neither helps nor hurts the change type.

It is also the strongest change type we can measure on category pages — nothing else we track wins more often there.

Small sample. Few of these tests cleared the bar. The 95% interval on that win rate runs 5% to 27%, so read the figure as directional.

The numbers

Won 12% No measurable change 82% Lost 6%
category pagesall page types
Tests analysed33 tests250+
Beat control12%15%
No measurable difference82%
Lost to control6%
Median lift when it won not reported

Median traffic per variant was 2131 visitors.

What else is worth testing on category pages

change typewin rate on category pagestests
Layout (this page) 12%33 tests
Styling 10%100+

Only change types with at least 30 tests on category pages appear here.

What tests on category pages measured

A win rate only means as much as the thing being counted, so this is what these tests were actually optimising for.

measured outcomeshare of tests
Purchase / order complete50%
Product or content page reached17%
On-page click / engagement12%
Lead / form submission10%

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.

Why this table is not a ranking

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.

Hold the metric fixed and the spread narrows sharply. Comparing only tests measured against a business outcome, 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.

What counts as a layout test

Blocks move, reorder or change position. No copy is rewritten and no new content is added. If you moved a section <em>and</em> rewrote it, that is two variables and the result will not tell you which one worked.

Control and variant wireframe for a layout A/B test
Control on the left, variant on the right. For how this differs from adjacent categories, see the layout benchmark.

Layout tests that won on category pages

  • It hid the subcategories list and added a hero section plus new grid-based product card layouts for the ramp categories.

    E-commerce+63.8%

  • A new horizontal scrollable subnavigation with category filter links was added above the product scroll wrapper.

    E-commerce+80%

  • A new horizontally scrollable sub-navigation bar with category filter buttons was added above the product list, linking to pre-filtered sale collection pages.

    E-commerce+28.4%

  • A new section with a title, a brochure download CTA, descriptive copy, and tabbed product content was added, while an existing row was hidden.

    E-commerce+21.2%

Layout tests that did not

  • The page replaced the Products title with a trust banner and simpler category headline, removed the benefits list and bundle call to action, and added star ratings under each product.

    E-commerceNo significant difference

  • It added a Jump To links block below the intro paragraph and inserted hidden scroll-offset anchors for smooth scrolling to page sections.

    E-commerceNo significant difference

  • It hid the default subcategory list and replaced it with a styled mobile hero section and a two-column grid of product category cards with images and links.

    E-commerceNo significant difference

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.

Who ran these tests

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.

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.