If you are a small-to-medium sized website owner, have you put off performing multi-variate testing on your website? A/B testing? Think it only matters for multi-million dollar ecommerce websites? Conversion rate optimization has finally started to get the attention it has deserved all along. But how many of you small-to-medium website owners are actually implementing a solid conversion improvement strategy on your website? The number of small-to-medium website owners implementing conversion optimization is slowly increasing, but guaging the impact of marketing campaigns is not only for large online retailers. ROI matters even more for small-to-medium businesses with fewer resources to play with. So Here are 5 free- to low-cost ways that small to medium websites can increase their optimization rates and boost ROI. 1. Establish conversion benchmarks. Where does your website stand right now in terms of sales? Are there areas of your website that you would like to see improve? Note this and establish your current website standing as a benchmark. 2. Choose your definition of success: Is it traffic? Sales for a certain product? Leads? Whatever it is, articulate these business goals and have your marketing person log your website activity up to this point as the benchmark for future improvements. This is critical since many firms lack an effective system for measuring the success of their website against business goals and objectives. 3. Set up website analytics: If you have not done so already have an analytics product installed to help you collect valuable information about how visitors are using your web site. This data is gold to a web site owner, as well organized data helps you to make timely decisions, such as the best products to feature, how effective your advertising efforts have been at bringing converting visitors to your web site, etc. An analytics program I've used with good results is Omniture's Site Catalyst. So, now that you've got this web site visitor data, what do you do with it? Next week we'll talk about how to use visitor data to raise your web site conversion rates.