Awareness is the first step to making your online sales or leads generation a success. And for that, you need metrics and goals. Here are the top goals you should set:

Conversion rate, for websites, is the amount of visitors you have versus the number of visits that led to a sale, lead or some other action. For example, if your goal is to get people to sign up for your newsletter, you got 500 subscriptions and had 5,000 visitors that month, your conversion rate is 10 percent. That’s actually pretty good. Retail sites only convert about 1 to 2 percent of visitors, which means they have to have 1 million visitors in order to make 10,000 sales.

Action item: Figure out your conversion rate right now. If you haven’t already, install an analytics system into your website (such as expo-MAX Analytics). Divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors in the same period of time. Now, decide how much you want to improve. Do you want to go from 50 new users to 100 new users a year? Then you’re going to either have to double your traffic or double your conversion rate. You’ve got your work cut out.

Homepage abandonment is similar to bounce rate, which measures how many users land on page and click away without clicking on any other links. Bounce rate is a tough metric, since it counts up accidental traffic and unqualified buyers along with those who might have been potential sales but were turned off by some aspect of your pitch. It’s more prudent to take a look at how many visitors bail after the first or second click through. If you are noticing that a high volume of visitors are abandoning your page after the second click, then there’s likely an issue somewhere along the line, be it a navigational issue or lack of a call-to-action.

Action item: Fire up your analytics reports and take a look at the visitor paths. Take note of where visitors tend to exit your homepage and focus on these pages. Is there too much content? Too little content? Is there an error on the page? Or is the page something different than what was promised on the landing page? By analyzing where visitors leave your site, you can better target your efforts for improving it.

Another important measure, cost per sale places value on your advertising campaigns in relation to the profit you make from a lifelong customer. This may help put your advertising budget in perspective. For example, if you determine that it costs $8 to get a customer, but they end up making $500 of purchases over a lifetime, the tradeoff is clearly worth it. Meanwhile, if you wind up paying $25 to get someone through the door and the pay $10 on a single purchase, there’s clearly an inefficiency somewhere along the line.

Action item: Calculate your cost per sale by dividing your advertising costs by the amount of sales you made in the same period. You may also want to factor in anticipated sales for repeat business. This will help you gauge your return on advertising, and may help you justify investing a bit more.

In summary, improving your sales, lead generations and conversions on the web relies heavily upon knowing where to focus your efforts. The above three metrics will help you set the right goals to improve your business.