Do split URL A/B tests work in E-commerce?

In line with both baselines. Split URL tests win 11% in E-commerce, against 11% for split URL tests generally and 14% for E-commerce generally. Neither the category nor the vertical is moving this much.

The strongest change type we can measure in E-commerce is CTA copy at 17% on 50+ tests.

The numbers

	E-commerce	all industries
Tests analysed	250+	1,000+
Beat control	11%	11%
No measurable difference	76%	—
Lost to control	13%	—
Median lift when it won	+22.9%	—

Median traffic per variant was 1260 visitors. Most ran on product pages (148), landing pages (69), homepages (59).

Every change type we can measure in E-commerce

change type	win rate in E-commerce	tests
CTA copy	17%	50+
Layout	16%	100+
Styling	16%	500+
Hero image	15%	50+
Body copy	14%	100+
Price framing	12%	50+
Split URL (this page)	11%	250+
Headline	8%	100+
Social proof	8%	50+

The industry overview is at E-commerce 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.