Do split URL A/B tests work in Marketplace?

In line with both baselines. Split URL tests win 8% in Marketplace, against 10% for split URL tests generally and 8% for Marketplace generally. Neither the category nor the vertical is moving this much.

The strongest change type we can measure in Marketplace is Styling at 9% on 50+ tests.

Small winner set. Few of these tests cleared the bar. The 95% interval on that win rate runs 3% to 21%, so read the figure as directional.

The numbers

Won 8% No measurable change 63% Lost 29%

	Marketplace	all industries
Tests analysed	38 tests	1,000+
Beat control	8%	10%
No measurable difference	63%	—
Lost to control	29%	—
Median lift when it won	not reported	—

Median traffic per variant was 1034 visitors. Most ran on lead capture pages (19), landing pages (10), homepages (4).

Every change type we can measure in Marketplace

change type	win rate in Marketplace	tests
Styling	9%	50+
Split URL (this page)	8%	38 tests

What split URL tests in Marketplace measured

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	44%
Lead / form submission	14%
Product or content page reached	12%
Signup / registration	12%

Outcomes below 5% of the set are not listed, so these do not sum to 100. Too few tests in this exact cut to break out on their own, so this is the whole industry. 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.

The industry overview is at Marketplace benchmarks; rates across all industries are on the split URL benchmark.

What counts as a split URL test

Traffic is split between two addresses. The variant is a different page at its own URL, not a modified version of the control.

Control and variant wireframe for a split URL A/B test — Control on the left, variant on the right. Only the changed element is highlighted.

Why there are no examples on this page

A split URL variant is a whole separate page, so every description of what changed reduces to "traffic goes to a different page". The detail lives on the variant page itself, which belongs to the customer.

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.

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.