Do layout A/B tests work on category pages?

About the same as anywhere else. Layout tests win 21% of the time on category pages, against 19% across all page types. This page neither helps nor hurts the change type.

It is also the strongest change type we can measure on category pages — nothing else we track wins more often there.

Small sample. Few of these tests cleared the bar. The 95% interval on that win rate runs 11% to 38%, so read the figure as directional.

The numbers

	category pages	all page types
Tests analysed	33 tests	250+
Beat control	21%	19%
No measurable difference	73%	—
Lost to control	6%	—
Median lift when it won	not reported	—

Median traffic per variant was 2131 visitors.

What else is worth testing on category pages

change type	win rate on category pages	tests
Layout (this page)	21%	33 tests
Styling	16%	100+

Only change types with at least 30 tests on category pages appear here.

What counts as a layout test

Blocks move, reorder or change position. No copy is rewritten and no new content is added. If you moved a section *and* rewrote it, that is two variables and the result will not tell you which one worked.

Control and variant wireframe for a layout A/B test — Control on the left, variant on the right. For how this differs from adjacent categories, see the layout benchmark.

Layout tests that won on category pages

Injects a new horizontal scrollable subnav with category filter links above the product scroll wrapper
Injects a new horizontally scrollable sub-navigation bar with category filter buttons (Pants, Tops, Shoes, etc.) above the product scroll wrapper, linking to pre-filtered sale collection pages
Injects a new section with title, brochure download CTA, descriptive copy, and tabbed product content, while hiding an existing row on the page
replaces the final sale h4 with a large styled sale banner and hides a duplicate localized sale text div

Layout tests that did not

hides the subcategories list and adds a category hero section plus new grid-based product card layouts for ramp categories
Keeps the email popup but replaces the hero product image and headline copy with a light category/product grid layout.
hides the subcategories list and inserts a mobile hero section with product grid cards linking to threshold ramp categories

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.

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.