Musician’s Guide To Tech Skills: Website Analytics
By Michael Brandvold of Michael Brandvold Marketing.
I posted a video that talked about how today you need to have tech skills to succeed. The video didn’t go into much detail on what specific tech skills you should have, so I thought I would list them for you. By all means I am not saying you need to be a master at these skills, you need to be a master at your music. But, having some basic understanding of these skills will go a long way in helping you further your career.
In this article I want to discuss the basics of web stats that you should understand.
Google Analytics is an amazing free web stats service you can add to any website. But Google Analytics is very much like Adobe Photoshop… lots and lots of features, but in the end you probably use only 10% of what is offers. WordPress offers free webstats for all WordPress sites, but unlike Google Analytics it only offers the 10% you will actually use.
Here are the basics you want to understand when it comes to stats.
1. Unique Visitors – This means unique individual people who visit your site. This is different from just Visitors, which will be a larger number than Unique Visitors since it counts every visit made by every person.
2. Referrers – This mean the source that sent that user or traffic to your website. Where did that fan come from, how did they end up on your website. Very often this will list sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. It is very important to know where fans are coming from, this can help you better target and find more fans.
3. Page Views – This means how many times a page in your website was viewed. This is important so you can tell which pages in your site are the most popular, what your fans like and don’t like.
4. Average Time Spent on Site – This means on average how long does a person spend on your website.
5. Search Terms – This is a list of what fans are searching for on sites such as Google that they click on to find your site.
There is ALOT more you can gather from Google Analytics, but if you pay attention to these five stats you will have a much better understanding of well you are doing online, what works, what doesn’t work and will be further ahead of most bands.
Other articles in this series looked at:
How to buy and manage a domain name.
How to change your domain’s DNS.
What is cPanel and what is it used for?
