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Artist Marketing Strategies: Understanding Site Traffic Trends

Self promotion means being an active participant in your success as an artist - and for many artists, a website has become a great place to present themselves to potential buyers.

How you drive traffic to your site is considered your "internet marketing strategy" and knowing where visitors find you,  how they get to your site and what they do once they get there is critical in continuing to refine and optimize that strategy.

Google Analytics does all of that. And it's free.

Build it and they will come - right?
The first step in an artist's internet marketing strategy is to have a website. You do not need a top-dollar custom designed flash extravaganza that'll cost you a small fortune to keep updated - but it should be professional designed. If you've created a MosaicGlobe account - your on your way. If not - go get one.

So now you've got the website - but are people visiting? If so, how many; and where are they coming from? To answer these questions we'll need to understand the three sources of website traffic.

1. Direct Traffic: This is people who type in your URL directly into the web browser or have your site bookmarked. They may have picked up your business card or have been referred by another collector or artist, etc.
2. Web Referrals: These are links from other websites or online emails, For example, perhaps you have an account at Etsy or ArtWanted with a link back to your website. Referral traffic will also include links from web email, artist directories, twitter, blog posts and paid banner ads/links.
3. Search Engines: This is the traffic that comes from search engines such as Google. There are two forms Paid and Unpaid.
   

- Unpaid is also referred to as organic traffic. For example: Someone searches your name in Google and your site pops up cause it's a good match (Your name is on your site, right?).

- Paid Traffic is also referred to as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) because you pay the search engine to send traffic your way. Example: You pay Google $1.00 for each person that is sent to you site after searching for "pet portraits".

Using Google Analytics
The fact is, that for a majority of artists/site owners, the statistics in Google Analytics is way more information than you'll need to get a good idea of what is and is not working with your site content and your traffic generation efforts.

The multitude of graphs, charts and raw data can seem intimidating at first - so we're going to take a look the basic features within Google Analytics to show you what you need to know - and what the numbers mean to you.

If you haven't installed Google Analytics tracking code into your site MosaicGlobe makes it easy to pop the tracking code into all the pages of your site. Check out the how-to documentation in support.

After you install the tracking code it takes about 24 hours for Google Analytics to start gathering data from your site and to get a realistic sense of traffic trends it's a good idea to let it gather at least a weeks worth of visitor data.

SNAPSHOT
Upon logging into your account and selecting your site you'll be presented with the dashboard. This page is a snapshot of your site traffic. The sample used in this article is for the Non-Profit art organization, CHAC (www.chacweb.org).

In the sample below we have adjusted the time period to July through December (the second half of 2008). We did this by clicking on the date range. Because this is a longer period of time we set the graph to show data by week rather than by day. Monthly is also an option and when looking at longer time periods it often helps to look a general trends rather than granular points.


Below the graph is some basic data points:

1. Visits
   This is the number of visitors to your site. It's important to note that this is the total number of visits to your site during this time period. The actual number of unique visitors is probably lower as visitors often visit more than once. We'll get back to this in a bit.
2. Pageviews
   On average, how many pages were seen by those visitors during that same time period. Pages/Visit is a better indicator of engaging content (See #3).
3. Pages/Visit
   On average, how many pages those visitors looked at during a visit. A higher number would suggest that your content is intriguing enough that visitors are browsing deep into the site.
4. Bounce Rate
   This is an interesting number that people tend to overlook. What percentage of your users leave your site without visiting any other page than the one they landed on. This typically happens when a person comes to your site and immediately thinks "nope, this isn't what I was looking for" and then leaves the site. 
5. Avg. Time on Site
   Pretty straight forward - on average how much time a user spend on the site. A higher number would suggest quality content but it also might mean that your visitors are walking away from their browsers. Pages/Visit (#3) is a better indicator of content quality. 
6. % New Visits
   Have these users been to your site before? High or low results are neither good or bad. A high percentage suggests your driving traffic to the site and a lower percentage would suggest your visitors are coming back for more - often referred to as visitor loyalty.
   

Clicking on each of these titles will take you to a more details analysis and we already have a great deal of information to get a good sense of our site traffic trends but let's move deeper into the reports for some other highlights.

On the left hand column is 5 sections links; Dashboard (the page we're on), Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content and Goals.

VISITORS
The Visitors section has a more detailed view of the information already presented on the dashboard. However, we have one additional number worth looking at.

Absolute Unique Visitors - Your may have 1,121 site visitors but only 947 of those were unique. That means that during the time period selected - some people came multiple times. Total visits divided by unique visitors tells us the average number of visits per visitor.

Map Overlay - If you concerned with attracting regional visitors than the map overlay section will be of interest to you. This section breaks down visitor data by geographic regions. Use the map to get an idea of where you visitors are located - but note that the city level can sometimes be deceiving as it only indicates the city where the ISP (Internet Service Provider) resides. This connection point may be used by a wide area surrounding that city.

The remaining content in this section includes information on your visitors, including languages, operating systems, internet speeds and web browsers.

TRAFFIC SOURCES
For most people, this section is the meat and potatoes of Google Analytics. Here we'll learn where our visitors are coming from: Direct, Referrals or via a Search Engine.

The Overview page helps us visualize the percentage of users coming from these three sources. Clicking on each title (next to the percentage or in the side column) will take us to the detail pages where we can get the actual number of visitors for each.

Direct Typing you URL in directly or having your site bookmarked. A high number of visitors via direct traffic indicates good word of mouth traffic.

Referring Sites  Includes a list of what sites have links to your own and how many visitors have came to your site via those links. This will help identify sites that are driving traffic to your site. Find out if your traffic is coming from an article, blog post, review, art directory, banner ad, facebook page, etc. Top: Clicking on the arrow next to the link will open that link in a new window.

Knowing this information will help define your future marketing initiatives and can help identify some unexpected traffic sources.

Search Engines This section is a list of search engines and how many visitors you have had from those search engines.

However, we want to know how the search engines sent traffic to your site. On the side column click on the 'keywords' link for a list of the keywords.

The keywords page shows you the keywords that people are using in the search engines to find your site.

As an artist, you probably want your name to be on this list somewhere, then perhaps the title of a show your in, an award, artwork title. Anything that indicates that people are looking for you. If your a gallery or a creative organization your probably going to want to see you organizations name on the list along with your services or events.

In our example you'll see that the top keywords are variations of the organizations name, services and location. Also, in our example site, if you beyond the top ten you would find the titles of a popular events and fundraisers, as well as the name(s) of associated artists and volunteers.

Note that if you are using Google's PPC advertising program you can separate Paid and Organic keywords to get a better idea of where your money is being spent.

We all know the importance of having our site rank high with specific words and phrases in the major search engines. But how search engines find and index your site can be a mystery. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a mix of site coding and quality content.

For more information on understanding the search engines click here.

CONTENT
The content section will show you what pages of your site are popular. Top landing pages are the pages that tend to bring people to the site and top exit pages are the pages that people tend to leave on.

If your exit rates are highest on your contact page that may suggest people like what they see, send you an email and leave. If your highest exit rates are on your main page you may want to considers redesigning it. Perhaps add a larger image of a popular piece and write some copy describing you and your work.

Try highlighting your most recent work and encourage visitors to look around.

GOALS
It's easy to get caught up analyzing the numbers, but if your really looking to measure results than you'll want to focus on outcomes.

The last section on Google Analytics is the goals section. Until you define a goal this section is empty. Your site goal may be a completed sale, getting someone to signup for your newsletter, reading your bio, or contacting you via a form.

Goals conversions are ideal if you have a "marketing funnel" in mind. At its most basic, a funnel is the steps a visitor takes from arriving at the site to reaching the goal (usually a sale). Otherwise, converting from visitor to buyer (then perhaps from buyer to collector).

Goals and conversions can be rather complex. For details on setting and tracking conversions see the Google support section.
ACTING ON THE DATA
We've just scratched the surface of Google Analytics features by covering the basics. With this information you should now be able to get a good sense oh how many people visit your site and how they are finding it.

The key to increasing traffic is knowing what works and what doesn't. Often that means experimenting and checking the results.

Some quick tips on generating traffic: Try partnering with other artists for link exchanges, participate in relevant artist forums, create profiles on art directories and social sites - all with links back to your own site. Using your keywords in these link can be very beneficial as well.

Some quick tips on optimizing keywords: If they are not finding your site with the search terms you would like, then experiment and look for positive changes in your traffic patterns. Find ways to get those search terms on your site. Add them to an article, blog post, image names, page titles, tags, etc. General search terms like "photographer", "artist", "illustrator", etc. are very competitive so include niche terms like "Seattle portrait photographer", "new york street artist" and "children's book illustrator". Anything that will increase the chances of attracting new visitors.

Some quick tips on generating a search engine friendly site: Text, lots of keyword rich text. Who you are, what you do and where your at is a good place to start. Also, keep n mind that search engines can't look at pictures so give your images real names like aspen-landscape.jpg rather than DSC_0026.jpg.

Pop into your Google Analytics account every now and then to see what's working and what isn't. But don't obsess over every daily rise and fall. Building traffic doesn't happen overnight and there is no magic bullet or secret formula to website success.

Look for broad trends over a six month period to get a good idea of whether or not your traffic is growing and where your visitors are coming from. Ask yourself some basic questions: Is your growth coming from search engines? Has your efforts with other sites panned out? How can I change pages that people are leaving from? Then make adjustments, go back to work and check back later.

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