In the past, I’ve blogged about the importance of benchmarking in your Google Pay-per-click campaign, and how we increased the effectiveness of a campaign by 318% by doing so.

We’ve done the same with our web sites. Here’s an example of what Merge did with a home page of a web site: We measured the ‘bounce’ rate (a bounce is when a user comes to a page and exits the site without visiting another page) of the home page and noted a 60% bounce rate. Wow. We analyzed the page, made some key changes (moved the navigation in a more user-friendly spot and changed the home page content) and waited.

A month later we went back and measured again. The result? The bounce rate decreased by 50% to only a 30% bounce rate. We’ll be making some more changes to the home page to decrease the bounce rate of the home page even more–but the key point is that we increased the effectiveness of the home page by 50% because we measured, benchmarked, changed and then remeasured.

Start measuring your metrics and begin the process of progress. If you do, you may discover a couple months from now how much business your current web site is leaving on the table.