We’ve heard a ton of explanations, and at times pleas, on the necessity for artists to have their websites all set up. A Website is a lobby to an artist’s works, lifestyle, and career and it creates a good bridge between their fans and themselves.
With social media channels offering a variety of ways to engage with our favorite artists, for a lot of people, having a website can feel antiquated. However, by building an artist website, you’re creating a hub for all the information being conveyed across these social channels to exist in one place.
If the head of a record label or a booking agent, for instance, suddenly wanted to know everything about you, will they be able to find it without much effort? Or will they have to sort through loose ends, empty profiles, and potentially wrong links to hear your music and establish a general understanding of what you’re up to? Without making any further inference, I bet you can determine the value of a website. Right….?
Great! So now let’s get down to brass tacks and discuss web analytics, which is exactly why I’m writing this article.
There can be more to an artist’s website than just a place to house links and pictures. Building a website is just the start – it’s up to you, the artist, what you want to achieve from your website. Maybe it’s to promote tour dates, maybe it’s to get more email addresses from fans – once you determine whatever that objective is, you can make it the centerpiece of your site.
Thankfully, too, there’s an abundance of web analytics tools out there to help you determine how successful your objectives are being met on your website. One of them and the most popularly used by marketers is Google analytics.
Google analytics, like every other web analysis tool anyway, provides your website visitors’ data so you can optimize your content based on their interest. It’s important to identify what users are doing on your website. So, you take productive decisions that grow your profit (downloads, streams, concert tickets, merch sales — you name it.) and increase website traffic. Website data analytics tools will equally help you to get users' behaviour, age, demographics, gender, and source of traffic, etc.
Using Google analytics might seem a little complex from the start but when you climb the ropes, you’ll realise it’s as simple as eggs are eggs.
But then, what makes me think that our Cameroon artists don’t use analytics, and does it even matter if they use them or not? If those were your thoughts, I’ll answer them straight away in a few seconds.
As a 6 months old girl into digital marketing, the little knowledge I've acquired so far from my superiors and colleagues while working on diverse projects has enabled me to understand that we are clearly lacking in terms of media digitalisation.
Musicians, bloggers and the like in Cameroon seriously believe that after setting up their website, leads and fans will magically appear. Their metrics and data practically mean nothing to them. All they care about is posting nice content on social media :(
While working on a project with a client last year, we reached out to ‘influencers’ most of whom were bloggers and musicians. Our purpose was to get hold of their KPI’s (key performance indicators) on the internet to determine which of them will be key to partner with for the brewery company’s advertising project.
Surprisingly, just one blogger out of the motley crew we reached out to, accurately complied with our request. The remaining 99% sang to the same tune: ‘i have over 100,000 followers’, ‘my publications have 500 likes and above’ etc and etc. You may be thinking that those are metrics after all, and you would be right- if we asked only for Social Media data.
We requested for their online visibility data, not just Facebook and Instagram (which they capitalised on). Given that they all had websites, it was rather astonishing that none was able to provide us with the data of their websites. What we all pondered on was this: what do they do with their websites? Until today, I’m still wondering.
The result of their non-compliance with our demand was a removal of this strategy from our digital marketing plan. And so you know, an influencer, if any was retained, would have bagged 500K per month as they billed. If this amount doesn’t blow your mind, well..it’s blown mine, and beyond sky-level, lol.
Also, a few months ago, while performing research on the most visited websites in Cameroon, we perused the data from the sites our tool produced. The websites (whose names need no pointing out) were poorly designed, low traffic rate and not optimised at all for search and mobile. That’s quite funny when I think of how they boast on social media about their websites and the traffic they get. If only they knew how terrible their results were, or maybe they do, who knows. Anyways … - If you’re curious about which tool we used to get their data, book a consultation with us :)
Whew. You made it all the way down here, thank you. This ultimately has been my high-level look at the importance of performing web analytics on your website and I sincerely hope you start doing it as of today. Begin by building a well-optimised and mobile-friendly website first, then you can link it with google analytics to help you monitor your site’s performance. Don’t feel overwhelmed – once you’re started, take some pride in your development as an artist or band and know that you’re establishing a business acumen that will help you navigate in your industry.
Tadbet Averra
P/R & Content writer @ Digital Gong Technologies - Digital marketing and web design agency, Douala-Cameroon.