If you have an artist website, even a single page with your bio, your songs and a booking email, Google Analytics can tell you who visits and what they do. You don't need a complicated setup. You need to answer three questions: how many people come, where from, and what they click. This guide keeps it to that.
Decide what you want to know
Before you install anything, write the questions down:
- Is anyone visiting my site, and is the number going up after a release?
- Where do people come from: Instagram, a Google search, YouTube, a QR code on a poster?
- What do they click: Spotify, YouTube, the booking email, the merch page?
Everything else in Analytics is optional. If a report doesn't help answer one of these, skip it.
Setting up Google Analytics
Google's current product is called Google Analytics 4, usually shortened to GA4. The names of menus change from time to time, so follow Google's current instructions if something looks different. The steps are:
- Sign in with a Google account that you will keep for years. Use one you control, not a friend's.
- Create an account and a property for your site.
- Add a web data stream and enter your site's address. Google gives you a measurement ID that starts with the letter G.
- Put the tag on your site. Most website builders have a field where you paste the measurement ID. If yours doesn't, you add the code snippet in the head of every page, or use Google Tag Manager.
- Open the Realtime report, then visit your site on your phone. If you see yourself appear within a minute, it works.
Reports fill in over the next day or so. Don't panic if the first day looks empty.
Where your visitors come from
Look at the traffic acquisition report. It groups visitors into channels, such as direct, organic search, organic social and referral. For a musician this shows whether people find you from Google, from Instagram or from someone else's page.
One problem to know about: links inside apps like Instagram are sometimes recorded as direct or as a referral from the app, not as social. The fix is easy, and it's the most useful trick in this article. Add tracking parameters to the end of links you share. For example, the link in your Instagram bio can carry utm_source=instagram and utm_medium=bio, and the link in your newsletter can carry utm_source=newsletter. Then Analytics reports them under the names you chose.
Use one parameter set per place and keep a short list of what you used. For a new single you can add utm_campaign with the song's name, so you can compare release weeks later.
Which links they click
Analytics can record clicks on links that lead away from your site. GA4's enhanced measurement can do this automatically, and the events report shows outbound clicks with the destination address. That's usually enough: you can see how many people went to Spotify, how many to YouTube and how many to your booking email.
If you want to be careful, make each button separate and clearly named, so the click data is easy to read. For a one-page site, don't bother with more. If you later want to follow a specific button as a key event, Google Tag Manager is the next step, but it isn't needed in the beginning.
What the website doesn't tell you
Website analytics shows what happens before the click. It can't tell you how many streams you got, in which country, or what you earned. Those numbers come from the platforms and from your distributor's reports. In the CULT dashboard, streams by platform and country appear for each reporting period once the partner reports are checked, with the source and period shown. Put the two side by side, and you can see whether a busy week on your site was followed by a busy week of listening.
Privacy and consent
Analytics collects information about visitors, and in many countries the law requires you to inform them and, for cookies, often to ask for consent before the tag runs. The rules differ between Europe, Türkiye, the Gulf and elsewhere, so check what applies to your audience.
Practical points:
- Write a short privacy page that says you use analytics and what for.
- If consent is required where your visitors live, use a consent banner that actually stops the tag until the visitor agrees. Many builders have one built in, and Google's consent settings can work with it.
- Never put names, emails or other personal data into Analytics fields.
- If you want less hassle, look at privacy-focused tools made to work without cookies. They show fewer details, but for an artist site that's often plenty.
Keep it simple
Look once a week, or in the week after a release. Read three numbers: visitors, top sources, top clicks. Ignore tiny samples, because ten visits is a rumour, not a trend. Your own visits can distort a small site, so don't refresh your page all day.
An hour of setup and five minutes a week is enough. The point is not to watch charts. It's to find out which of your links is working and put your effort there.