Charles Shaw Chardonnay, also known as “Two Buck Chuck,” beat hundreds of other wines and was named the top prize in a tasting competition in California. The most expensive wines in the competition, some priced as high as $55, didn’t even win a medal. I often wonder: Did the person spending 50 dollars for one of those non-medal-winning wines really get what he or she paid for?

A taste test is, of course, just one measurement of success. And as the name of the test itself implies, it’s based on a very subjective standard. One person’s table wine is another person’s medal winner.

So what does a bottle of wine have to do with selling cars? When marketing vehicles over the Internet, dealers have a huge opportunity to zero in on exactly what’s working and what’s not. And they don’t have to rely on a graphic designer’s taste or a sales manager’s hunch. Instead, they can make real-time advertising decisions based on how consumers respond to their online ads and then adjust their advertising accordingly.

In addition to the various pages of your web site, all of which can be tested and measured, you can monitor and evaluate every component of your online advertising, from block ad to landing page to micro site. The most basic of tests, split A-B tests are used to determine the better of two or three choices. This is a simple, inexpensive mechanism for testing, say, different online ads or home pages in a live environment. Results are typically measured in click-through or conversion rates.

A more complex testing mechanism is multivariate testing, which can handle multiple groups of elements, such as graphics and text on the same page. For example, a landing page may have different subheads, body copy, fonts, pictures, offers and so on. This form of testing enables you to determine which combination of elements works best and is especially useful when evaluating different landing pages. When done properly, multivariate tests enable you to maximize a site visitor’s experience. An advanced version allows you to test different sections of a web page that might interact with each other.

The split and multivariate tests are the two primary methodologies used to measure online activity. A less demanding test is the linger test, which simply measures how long a site visitor remains on a page. If the visitor “lingers” long enough, it’s considered a conversion. This type of test is useful for evaluating content.

No matter which test you choose, the beauty is you can keep testing and testing until you reach the desired 100 percent conversion rate. And you don’t have to do the work yourself. There are plenty of companies who understand the ins and outs of online marketing analysis and are willing to run these tests for you.

Before the Internet, you rarely knew if your advertising dollars – always a huge chunk of your budget – were delivering the results you expected. But now with online advertising, all that’s changed. You can immediately and constantly track key performance indicators for your online ads and your web site, as well as the leads generated. This means you can know at any point in the day or during a campaign which ads are the most successful based on the pages visited and the visitor’s response to those pages. In a sense, your site visitors do your market research for you. And, as we all know, the customer is always right.

So can testing and analyzing text and images really make a difference? I opened my comments by referring to wine; I’d like to end my comments with a nod to baseball. As explained in Michael M. Lewis’ excellent book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, the Oakland Athletics is a pro baseball team known for doing more with less. That’s because its organization realized that interpreting key data is a more reliable way of identifying talent than the old formula of sending a scout around the country, and considerably cheaper. The result? The Oakland Athletics were able to build a winning team around less expensive players who ultimately performed just as well, if not better, than more expensive superstars.

Sometimes you don’t just get what you pay for, you get more.

Sarah Mooneyhan is the vice president of marketing and a co-founder of eBizAutos.