A topic that starts to get scary for bands who want to focus on the musical and creative side of their work rather than get bogged down in the technical side of the business is that of web analytics. I can hear guitarists, singers and musicians of all sorts reaching for the mouse to close their browser window already, but bear with me! So much interaction happening online is wasted activity and therefore wasted time that could be better spent on music or interacting with your fans, and analytics tools can help to reduce this wasted energy.

While such tools require a certain amount of time to set up, they can really give fantastic feedback of not only how well your campaigns and promotions are working, but also how best to interact with your particular fan base. Why go to the bother of maintaining a specific music profile page when most of your fans want to interact with you via Twitter or Facebook? Tools such as Google Analytics will help monitor how and where your fans are finding their way to you, and even what they like when they find you. All of this can all help to optimise your presence online by customising your sites to make them easier to find on search engines, and help to give you an idea of what your fans want from you online. Are your fans spending most of their time watching videos you’ve posted? Analytics tools will highlight how popular your videos are so you know that by increasing the number or variety of the videos on your site, your fans will be more likely to keep returning to check out new videos, or re-watch their favourites.

There are a wealth of different levels of analysis you can use for your sites, from simple link-tracking using sites such as bit.ly which will help to highlight how many users click links posted on various sites (try using different short links on different social media sites to see which is most successful in sending users to the sites you post), through to more comprehensive systems, including Google Analytics, which will give a wealth of information from search engine terms, time spent on the site, most popular pages, and even locational hotspots based on IP address locations. Platforms such as Topspin and Bandcamp are built around giving great feedback to bands and artists to help promote their music, with embeddable widgets are gathering data that can really give clear indications as to social media successes, and even help with gathering mailing lists through to sale of music and other physical and digital products.

Why the Beatles reference in the title of this post I hear you ask? I am referring to Pandora’s Tim Westergren who wrote a fantastic article about how important or successful a dedicated online marketing assistant can be for a band. While analytics and general web presence maintenance and promotion are vital to a ban’s success in the current music business climate, much of what is entailed can be time-consuming and often needs someone particularly technically-minded, and can benefit from someone’s dedicated attention. If a band wants to be successful it is worth appointing someone to help out with this side of their music, leaving them freer to concentrate on their specialist skills – creating and playing music.

Related posts:

1. Traditional vs. Digital: Artist Management in 2010 As an observer, something like the yearly MIDEM conference in...
2. Fan Inclusion: A Unique Fan Experience For me, one of the most exciting elements of a...
3. "Deluxe Packages & The Independent Artist": Multi-tier Releases for the Indie Musician With the success of multi-level priced releases by artists such...
4. Meet the Industry twins: 'Record' & 'Music' Okay, so you can’t turn anywhere online at the moment...
5. Foursquare & Fan Rewards Rewards and the element of friendly competition can be a...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.