Today we’re talking two very cool tools for metrics and tracking – my favourite subject. Understanding your metrics and how they work gives you leverage in your business. Even if you’re only just starting out as a musician and have a limited audience, you need to have a hypothesis of who it is, or will be to start building it. If you find it difficult understanding who it consists of, just think of your audience as a reflection of your interests and values – this is how it works most of the time. By being clear on who you are you can start creating content around those areas and attract your fellow weirdos.
Most of the time when I ask a musician the question “who is your target audience or fans”, I get so many random answers. “It’s for everyone”, “anyone from the age of x to y”, “people who like hip hop”. This is not detailed enough, dig deeper and think about how you relate to your favourite artists; what was it that made you feel a connection and why? Apply this to seeking your fanbase and communicating relatable content with them. Once you’ve figured this out the two tools I’m writing about today will help you to scale up your reach to new fans and audiences.
Two FREE tracking devices (as I like to call them) that are fundamental to understanding who has been interacting with your websites and social ads, must be installed as soon as possible. Allowing you to start making better decisions on who to target and reach out to. It’s best to do this as soon as you are live so you don’t waste any traffic information coming to your pages.
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Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a popular tool that’s been around for a while. I still come across many musicians who are still not using and not tracking their metrics though their sites are live. It’s completely free to use and pretty easy to understand. You get tons of analytics about your traffic and get to see the behaviour of your visitors while browsing your website:
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How long visitors were on your site
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Which geographical areas bring the most traffic/fans to your site
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To learn which search terms on search engines are bringing the traffic to your site
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To understand the type of content you should keep creating
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To understand why visitors might be leaving your site so soon
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To get to know which social platforms you should be focusing your attention on
If you teach yourself to learn Google Analytics and metrics, you’ll also learn how your brand is presented, how your website works and what you can change on it to really maximise its efficiency for many purposes. Staying on top of these metrics every week regardless of your business size will help to understand your audience leading to easier growth opportunities.
2. Facebook Pixel
A pixel is a piece of code from Facebook that you add to your website which begins tracking your audience’s interests and behaviour when using Facebook – most people have their Facebook running in the background of their phone or browser at all times. The pixel then starts to give you this information which helps you to start targeting your social media ads more efficiently rather than just targeting random, huge lists of generic groups of people. You can start targeting similar people that have already interacted with you and your brand or have similar interests with your current crowd, which means the new targets are more likely to be interested in you. Most people just select an audience they think they know, based on the interests and behaviours you can choose from, and you are left with a target market of 13.000.000 people. Its easy to get lost here right?
Creating an audience with the pixel based on your website visitors is also a great way to start retargeting those same people. You’ll be able to create ads after they leave your site inside Facebook and Instagram. It usually takes 7 interactions with a potential customer/fan before they even notice you in this marketing world. Using a retargeting campaign with Facebook Pixel will automate the 7 interactions which wasn’t possible before.
Another interesting function of the pixel is something called a ‘lookalike audience’. This is where it gets super interesting. You can create a lookalike audience based on the data that has been collected with the pixel that’s installed on your website. Let’s say a fan signs up to your email list to download your music or sign up to a newsletter – they will land on your ‘Thank You’ or confirmation page. A pixel can be used at this stage, because you know this person is definitely interested in you, right? A pixel will collect their information such as their interests, behaviours and other demographics through their Facebook account. You can then find more people based on the information the pixel collects. Growing your fans in a thought out, planned way that is much more targeted will reap you fantastic results for your money on Facebook and Instagram paid ads.
You can also upload your existing email list in Facebook Business Manager to create a custom audience based on the people in your list to create a lookalike. Again, targeting people with similarities to your already existing fans/audience/subscribers.
If you’re using or planning to use paid ads it is absolutely critical that you install Facebook Pixels. Even if you don’t want to use ads, using pixels is still a fantastic way to get valuable insights through the dashboard of the demographics and behaviour. Allowing you to get smarter with so many aspects of your business and brand.
