About the same as anywhere else. Styling tests win 10% of the time on category pages, against 11% across all page types. This page neither helps nor hurts the change type.
Layout tests carry a higher published rate on category pages — 12% on 33 tests tests — though see the note below before reading that as a recommendation.
| category pages | all page types | |
|---|---|---|
| Tests analysed | 100+ | 1,000+ |
| Beat control | 10% | 11% |
| No measurable difference | 69% | — |
| Lost to control | 21% | — |
| Median lift when it won | +37% | — |
Median traffic per variant was 3540 visitors.
| change type | win rate on category pages | tests |
|---|---|---|
| Layout | 12% | 33 tests |
| Styling (this page) | 10% | 100+ |
Only change types with at least 30 tests on category pages appear here.
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 | 50% |
| Product or content page reached | 17% |
| On-page click / engagement | 12% |
| Lead / form submission | 10% |
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.
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.
Visual treatment shifts — spacing, weight, borders, colour, shadows — with the same content in the same order. Move the content and it is a layout test. Rewrite it and it is a copy test.
The product cards moved the price above the title, made the price and category text bold, hid the vendor label, and added a hover or tap tooltip with available sizes.
The list had items with empty values, and those items were hidden.
The primary button’s background and border changed from their original color to green, while the text stayed the same.
An element was hidden from the page instead of being shown, with no text changes.
It added smooth auto-scrolling to results when join-type links were clicked, resized the hero heading and subheading on mobile, and changed the hero banner background image with a dark overlay.
A read-more toggle was added that expanded truncated content by removing the height clamp and fade overlay, then hid the trigger link after clicking.
The page hid the tabs collection, visual filter, and original heading, and showed an alternate heading and the collection description block instead.
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.
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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