Why A/B Testing Is Like Sex In High School

 

I felt a little silly about having posted yesterday about A/B testing results for wine products,  because I'm pretty sure that most wineries (since most wineries are small wineries) aren't doing A/B testing.

Number one reason?  They have no idea how to do it.  Followed closely by "no time to do it."

Serendipitously, this post from CopyBlogger showed up the same day: Why Split-Testing is Like Sex in High School.  Despite the headline, it's a nice little tutorial on split (or A/B) testing.  If your website is based on Wordpress, there's even a handy tool to help you.

In order to do A/B testing, you need some way to measure things.  So, the first step is to make sure you have some sort of analytics package installed on your website.  Google Analytics is free and more than overkill for most winery websites.

What's the first page on your website you should A/B test?  Probably the most popular page on your site, where you should be trying to lower the bounce rate.  Again, you'll need some sort of measurement tool to tell which page that is.

Got questions about A/B testing or Google Analytics?  Leave a comment, and I'll do my best to answer it.

Comments

[Kim]

Mike,
Funny, we keep spitting out valuable info and it seems that no one is taking the advice. The first one who does is going to benefit huge!

People need to figure out how to market online. Getting people to the tasting room and to purchase the wines in the key! If you don't talk about it, and aren't part of the conversation then you will be out.

I reviewed a wine from a winery and gave them pretty good marks, yet, they didn't even know it. So I sent an email to all the wineries and said...you may want to follow my blog because you never know when I am going to talk about you!

We'll see!

[Andrew Kamphuis]

Mike you hit the nail on the head. Wineries don't know how to, followed by not having time to. Unlike sex they don't teach A/B testing in highschool.

[Christian Miller]

So true. Few wineries do it with their labels either, arguably an even more critical decision. Yet the label tests I've run have been remarkably insightful and useful.