Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign. The success of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, there are steps that you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors over a given period of time, say a month.

However, just because hordes of people have visited your site, this does not necessarily mean that your site is successful. It is equally important to monitor the people that actually performed the action that your site was set up for and figure out the ratio of people who visited to people who took action. This is called your conversion rate.

To find your site conversion rate, take the number of people who performed the desired action on your site and divide that number by the number of total visitors to your site. Then multiply that result by 100. For example, you had 2000 visitors to your site in a given month. 25 of those visitors performed the action desired on your site. Your conversion formula would be (25/2000) X 100. In this case, the conversion rate would be 1.25%.

Another important rate to track is your sales conversion rate. If the desired action on your site is to provide a name and email address, how many of those people actually bought your product? Not everyone who provides their name and email address will actually buy.

After tracking these rates, you may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you are not getting good results. One way to boost your rates is to get increased traffic to your site. This can be done by launching a search engine optimization campaign so that people can find your site more readily.

Another factor to examine is the ease of use of your website. If the goal of your website is for a visitor to fill out a form, is the form easily accessible and understandable? If it's not clear or if the visitor has to perform multiple steps to accomplish the goal, they may just move on to another site.

Finally, you may want to have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure.

Evaluating your website performance is an ongoing process. Constantly tracking your conversion rates and analyzing your marketing campaigns can make the difference between profit and loss in your business. The biggest marketing mistake you can make is to just put up your website and forget it!