Weak on both counts. Split URL tests win 5% in Media & Publishing, below the 10% these tests manage across all industries and below the 12% that Media & Publishing manages across all change types. There is usually something better to spend a test slot on.
The strongest change type we can measure in Media & Publishing is Headline at 6% on 50+ tests.
Small winner set. Few of these tests cleared the bar. The 95% interval on that win rate runs 2% to 13%, so read the figure as directional.
| Media & Publishing | all industries | |
|---|---|---|
| Tests analysed | 50+ | 1,000+ |
| Beat control | 5% | 10% |
| No measurable difference | 77% | — |
| Lost to control | 19% | — |
| Median lift when it won | not reported | — |
Median traffic per variant was 899 visitors. Most ran on landing pages (32), content pages (23), homepages (3).
| change type | win rate in Media & Publishing | tests |
|---|---|---|
| Headline | 6% | 50+ |
| Split URL (this page) | 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 |
|---|---|
| Purchase / order complete | 42% |
| Product or content page reached | 25% |
| Lead / form submission | 20% |
| Outbound click to a provider | 6% |
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 Media & Publishing benchmarks; rates across all industries are on the split URL benchmark.
Traffic is split between two addresses. The variant is a different page at its own URL, not a modified version of the control.
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.
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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