In line with both baselines. Headline tests win 7% in E-commerce, against 8% for headline tests generally and 10% for E-commerce generally. Neither the category nor the vertical is moving this much.
The strongest change type we can measure in E-commerce is CTA copy at 20% on 50+ tests.
| E-commerce | all industries | |
|---|---|---|
| Tests analysed | 100+ | 500+ |
| Beat control | 7% | 8% |
| No measurable difference | 81% | — |
| Lost to control | 12% | — |
| Median lift when it won | +45% | — |
Median traffic per variant was 1322 visitors. Most ran on homepages (65), product pages (49), landing pages (24).
| change type | win rate in E-commerce | tests |
|---|---|---|
| CTA copy | 20% | 50+ |
| Layout | 11% | 100+ |
| Styling | 11% | 500+ |
| Split URL | 10% | 250+ |
| Social proof | 9% | 50+ |
| Price framing | 8% | 50+ |
| Hero image | 7% | 50+ |
| Headline (this page) | 7% | 100+ |
| Body copy | 6% | 100+ |
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% |
| Signup / registration | 14% |
| On-page click / engagement | 10% |
| Add to cart | 9% |
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.
The industry overview is at E-commerce benchmarks; rates across all industries are on the headline benchmark.
The main heading is rewritten. Structure, styling and every other element stay put.
The headline changed from a general promise to one that guaranteed damp or humid nights.
The headline changed from a plain message to a progress-style line that showed how many steps were left before the price was revealed.
The headline changed to promote a 20% sitewide discount that could be redeemed with the code CYBER20.
The headline changed from a general promotion to one announcing a Valentine’s 40% discount.
It hid the existing content block and added a new centered H1 heading at the top of the section.
The payment option label changed to a secure card payment message, the wallet icon was replaced with a card icon, and a yellow note box was added recommending card payment for box shipping options.
The original hero headline was replaced with a benefit-focused headline, and a bullet list of product features, a verified-reviews badge, and a mobile hero image with a price tag were added.
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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