In line with both baselines. Headline tests win 6% in Media & Publishing, against 8% for headline tests generally and 12% for Media & Publishing generally. Neither the category nor the vertical is moving this much.
It is the strongest change type we can currently measure in Media & Publishing.
Small winner set. Few of these tests cleared the bar. The 95% interval on that win rate runs 2% to 15%, so read the figure as directional.
| Media & Publishing | all industries | |
|---|---|---|
| Tests analysed | 50+ | 500+ |
| Beat control | 6% | 8% |
| No measurable difference | 91% | — |
| Lost to control | 4% | — |
| Median lift when it won | not reported | — |
Median traffic per variant was 359 visitors. Most ran on content pages (32), homepages (8), landing pages (7).
| change type | win rate in Media & Publishing | tests |
|---|---|---|
| Headline (this page) | 6% | 50+ |
| Split URL | 5% | 50+ |
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 |
|---|---|
| Outbound click to a provider | 24% |
| Purchase / order complete | 24% |
| Product or content page reached | 19% |
| Lead / form submission | 15% |
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.
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 Media & Publishing 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 was shortened by removing a person's full name from the title.
The headline changed from a simple instructional line about how to watch the streaming service in a specific country to one with a trailing arrow.
The headline changed from a generic offer to one that mentioned 500,000 over-60s had joined and included a free eBook.
The headline, subhead, and question copy changed from a curiosity-based angle to a pain-point angle about monthly income, and the answer options changed too.
It added announcement copy about a new high-authority media partner and a lead-in for a major partnership.
The headline and body copy changed from a health angle to a longevity angle, a subheadline was added, and a portrait photo of an elderly man was placed beneath the headline.
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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