3 Big Reasons To Install Stat Tracking On Your Music Website

So you know the importance of building your music site and have one set up and ready to go. It looks great, there is a lot of good info on there, and you're confident people will like it.

But you're not done yet. Having a website is a lot less useful if you can't tell how many people are visiting it. You'll want to know what kind of pages they're visiting on there, and generally who's using your website. All of this information is important when it comes to deciding a few things:

1. What kind of content you should be publishing on your music website.
2. What's working in your music career and what's not.
3. Where you should be putting efforts into in terms of promotions.
4. Where you should hold your next tour.
5. Etc.

While there are many reasons you should install stat tracking on your website, here are a few of the biggest ones. It's my hope that after reading this you'll get some kind of statistic tracking on your website and learn how to use it at least to a basic level.

But first, if it's your aim to do music professionally, you'll want to check out our free ebook while it's still available:

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1. Statistic Tracking Software Shows You Where Your Current Fanbase Is And Who They Are

I'm sure you've heard the saying ‘knowledge is power'. In this case that point is perfectly true. Without statistic services like Google Analytics and Statcounter you'd have no idea how many people are visiting your site and if it's successful or not. Not only that, but you don't get an idea of who it is that's interested in your music.

For example, one musician I worked with had a fanbase, but he didn't have any statistic tracking on his website. I started working with him just as he was about to launch a new mixtape, and when I asked where the bulk of his fanbase was he was convinced they were from his home town of London England.

Guess what? As his mixtape was released, sales started pouring in… But not so much from London. It turns out he had quite a geographically diverse fanbase with a big portion of his fans being from Manchester and Birmingham. In fact, only around 10% of his initial sales came from London.

Once we installed Google Analytics on his website the stats reflected this. This informed him that it'd be worth trying to get shows in these areas, something he had never thought to do before. His launch showed him he had a group of people in a specific area who was willing to pay to listen to him, so showing these stats to event organizers in these areas should make a good case for him performing there and getting paid.

As well as showing the location of your fans, you can also find out:

• The age group of your website visitors,
• The gender,
• Whether they're visiting your site using a mobile phone or desktop,
• How many pages each person views,
• How engaged they are with your content,
• And a lot more.

This information can literally help you double or more your income from music, as long as you get it set up and learn what the information means to your music career. It's not as difficult as it may initially sound, and once it's set up, which is as easy as copying and pasting pre-generated code into your website, it's simply a case of looking at the information.

Note: Some website builders for musicians might have some way to track stats already built in.

2. Google Analytics Allows You To Track When Someone Converts And Downloads Your EP

As well as seeing who's visiting your website, you can also see how many people are doing what you want them to on your site. Google Analytics has conversion tracking built in which is surprisingly easy to set up. This is called Google Goals. There are guides with step by step instructions on setting this up.

Basically what this does is allows you to see how many people are visiting your download page then going on to download something. Or how many people are visiting a certain number of pages on your website. While there are a number of ways to use Goals to see if people are doing what you want, here's a good example of one way you should definitely be using them.

Let's say you have a page on your website which you send people to to download your free EP in exchange for their email address. That's the only purpose of this page; to get people to send their email address in exchange for your ep.

Now, no matter how good your EP is, you won't get 100% of people going on to download it. If you've pre-sold the idea well before they get on the page, you may get 30-50% of people going on to download. That's providing you also have a high converting page design.

If your page is laid out in a way which doesn't convince people to download however, you might get a 0-10% conversion rate. So for every 10 people who visit your page you'll only get 0 or 1 person downloading.

With goals you can track how many people visit your page and end up downloading / going to the download page. From here you can change up your page and see if you can get people converting higher. It's possible to change a page converting at 0% to get more than 20% signing up. Just by changing how you present your offer. The layout, your wording, your images; it all counts when trying to convince people to download your material.

Be sure to check this out so you can see if your landing pages are getting you sign ups or driving people away.

3. Stat Tracking Shows Where Your Fans Are Coming From

This last point should be used in conjunction with the above Goals feature in Google Analytics. Even if you're using another statistic service, this part can also be used without Goals.

Fact: not all places which send potential fans your way will have the same quality of people visiting your website. For example, 100 people may come to your site from someone else's Twitter page and only 4 of them end up becoming a fan of you (measured by them downloading your EP for for this example). On the other hand, you may get 100 people coming to you from a respected website in your genre and 20 of those 100 go on to become fans.

Based on those figures, the visitors from the respected website converted people in to fans at a 500% higher rate than that person's Twitter share. What does this tell you? That you'll want to focus on getting covered on that website more than trying to get tweeted about by that person again.

Finding out where the best places to get fans from will show you where to focus your marketing effort and get the best results for your time and money.

Conclusion

If you're not already tracking your website statistics you need to start doing that asap. What you learn from it all will help you spend time doing the right things and stop doing the things which aren't working.

Do you have any other reasons why people should check their stats? If so let us know in the comments.