OK, so when you’re thinking “rock star life,” you probably don’t include spreadsheets and bar charts in that picture. (Unless you’re seriously nerdcore, anyway.)  However, for indie musicians who are serious about their music marketing, it’s worth getting your hands dirty on the business side.

The same online tools available to any small business can be used to help refine your own promotional efforts, especially on your website.  Google Analytics is among the most powerful tools for doing this, and it’s free!

Go here if you want a quick guide to getting started.  We’ll skip the tech talk, since it’s easy to set up, and focus instead on what it can do for you.

How Google Analytics Boosts Your Music Marketing

Analytics give you a huge amount of data about the people visiting your website, which gives you information you can use to refine your music marketing efforts.  It can also give you plenty of insights into your fans, and what they’re looking for.

For example, you can:

• Track visitor locations.  You can pin down where you fans are, making  your tours more likely to succeed.
• See the referring source for your visitors, letting you know who’s coming in through Google, Bing, Facebook, etc.  This is great for learning which websites your fans prefer to use.
• Get a better idea of your offline marketing’s effectiveness.  If you send out a bunch of postcards or put stickers with your website all over local bars, you’ll know instantly if it gives you a traffic boost.
• Oversee the performance of all your efforts.  You’ll know exactly which tracks are getting listens, which website pages are going ignored, and which side-projects people are most interested in.
• Notice early that you’re going viral.  A sudden unexpected surge in hits often indicates that a particular website or social network has discovered you.  (If it’s Reddit, mirror your website ASAP.)

And that’s really just the start!   With a little creativity, you’ll be able to ferret out virtually any information about your audience that you might want.

Or for more music marketing tips, check our previous blogs!