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Do styling A/B tests work in Marketplace?

In line with both baselines. Styling tests win 9% in Marketplace, against 11% for styling tests generally and 8% for Marketplace generally. Neither the category nor the vertical is moving this much.

It is the strongest change type we can currently measure in Marketplace.

Small winner set. Few of these tests cleared the bar. The 95% interval on that win rate runs 4% to 17%, so read the figure as directional.

The numbers

Won 9% No measurable change 76% Lost 15%
Marketplaceall industries
Tests analysed50+1,000+
Beat control9%11%
No measurable difference76%
Lost to control15%
Median lift when it won not reported

Median traffic per variant was 2531 visitors. Most ran on other pages (28), homepages (20), category pages (15).

Every change type we can measure in Marketplace

change typewin rate in Marketplacetests
Styling (this page) 9%50+
Split URL 8%38 tests

What styling 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 outcomeshare of tests
Purchase / order complete35%
Product or content page reached28%
Lead / form submission12%
On-page click / engagement10%

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.

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

What counts as a styling test

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.

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

Styling tests that won in Marketplace

  • It hid the slider row and made the video full-width and cropped with a centered, styled overlay heading without changing the wording.

    Homepage+14.8%

  • It hid the variant-A spans and lists, showed the variant-B spans and lists instead, and removed the bottom margin from paragraphs inside the variant-B basket item div.

    Homepage+8.2%

  • The hero section was made more compact, changing its layout and size without changing the wording.

    Homepage+3.4%

  • The primary button’s background and border changed from their original color to green, while the text stayed the same.

    Category page+61.2%

Styling tests that did not

  • The call-to-action element that came right after an artwork list item was hidden.

    No significant difference

  • 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.

    Category pageNo significant difference

  • It hid the elements with class ab-test-a and showed the elements with class ab-test-b without changing any wording.

    No 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.