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Do styling A/B tests work in Marketplace?

In line with both baselines. Styling tests win 13% in Marketplace, against 15% for styling tests generally and 12% 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.

The numbers

Marketplaceall industries
Tests analysed50+1,000+
Beat control13%15%
No measurable difference72%
Lost to control15%
Median lift when it won +16.8%

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) 13%50+
Split URL 11%38 tests

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

  • Changes primary button background/border color to green, no text change
  • Reduces heading font size/line-height on mobile and restyles the h1 subspan's font size, weight, spacing, and color without changing any text
  • Hides the position/checkbox selection fields (row and form-group) from the form
  • Changes the background color of the activity search element to orange

Styling tests that did not

  • Hides several existing page sections/columns (main content area and specific nested divs) without changing any text
  • Hides the league image area and a postcode filter section, and adjusts widths/padding of layout columns at different screen sizes
  • hides an h2 element nested inside a figure/div/div/div structure

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.