As a voice actor, you’re a business owner — and in more cases than not, you’re the one responsible for sourcing your leads and building relationships with potential clients.
On this front, your website plays an integral part in your voice acting marketing mix, and many voice actors have already jumped on board with hosting a branded website, in addition to holding profiles on other websites, like Voices.
In this article
- Approaching Analytics
- Outlining the Basics of Web Analytics
- Who’s Visiting Your Voice Acting Website?
- What Content Are Your Visitors Engaging with Online?
- Where Are Your Website Visitors Physically Located?
- When Does Your Website Traffic Increase and Decrease?
- Why Are Visitors Coming to Your Voice Acting Website?
- How is Web Traffic Reaching Your Voice Acting Site?
- Why You Googled Yourself — and Pay Attention to Keywords
- Tips for Setting Up a Web Analytics Account
- Choosing an Analytics Service and Implementing Change
However, it’s worth mentioning that your voice acting website is always acquiring useful data about who is visiting, where they’re coming from, what content is attracting them and even what else they’re searching for. All you have to do is tap into web analytics and doing so may be easier than you think.
While there are some major players in the field when it comes to web-based analytics, these tips are applicable across most of the platforms you can choose to use. Voices has put together some tips for operating your analytics account.
Approaching Analytics
Looking into web analytics for voice actors is manageable, even if you’re an entrepreneur running your own company. You don’t have to be an expert, but using some sort of web analytics can be beneficial to just about anyone with a business and a website.
It can be helpful for website owners to understand the way their visitors act in the same way that a brick-and-mortar store does. Using website data, you can discover how people are interacting with the content on your site and make adjustments based on that information.
Outlining the Basics of Web Analytics
By using web-based analytics, business owners can answer the basic questions: who, what, where, when, why and how?
Looking further into those questions we can see how data helps solve problems.
Who’s Visiting Your Voice Acting Website?
Analytic platforms like Google Analytics can often give you an idea of your audience’s age and the language their browser is set to. For example, in Google Analytics, there is a tab marked Audience’ that has additional information such as demographics.
This information can be valuable for helping you understand who your content is resonating with and if you’re attracting the people that you want to attract.
What Content Are Your Visitors Engaging with Online?
A voice acting website can represent a big investment of your time, doing things like crafting a vocal description and marketing your abilities or creating blog posts to help coach others. Wouldn’t it be nice to see that this content is performing the way you wanted it to and bringing the right visitors to your site?
Digging into what they are viewing once they arrive can tell you a lot about what’s resonating with visitors. For instance, looking at landing page information can tell you what page visitors are coming to first, giving you clues as to what attracted them to you in a search.
Additionally, zeroing in on which page visitors are spending the most time on (time on page) can give you an indication as to what content drew them in. Say you had ten demos on a page and each is a minute long. Visitors would need to stay at least ten minutes to listen to each one. So, if you see ‘time on page’ is at 45 seconds, visitors are not investing the time listening to demos as the page intends.
Knowing your demos aren’t being listened to might be an indication to update them or restructure those demos on the page.
Even looking at the number of page views can be informative. For instance, say your blog on audiobooks is getting a lot of views. This may be a sign that you should further promote your audiobook demo… but if you don’t even have an audiobook demo, this could be an indication to create one.
Where Are Your Website Visitors Physically Located?
Even though the digital age has made it possible to be a successful voice actor from anywhere, it can still be useful to identify geographic trends in those who are interested in your services.
Analytics programs do this by gathering data from IP addresses, which can indicate where your visitors live. Say you discover that you’re drawing web traffic from entertainment hubs, such as New York or Los Angeles, this might confirm that you’re gaining attention from others in the entertainment industry.
However, if you notice that you’re pulling visitors to you from the southern states, and you provide voice over in a southern dialect, this is also a positive sign that you’re getting the right people to your page.
When Does Your Website Traffic Increase and Decrease?
Looking at how much traffic you had throughout certain hours, days and weeks can be especially useful when it comes to monitoring whether a change you made increased visitors.
For example, say you were running a promotion and decided to pay to advertise online. Did it result in increased traffic? If not, then you’re in a better position to decide if it’s worth it to keep paying for online advertising or to switch strategies. You might be able to keep that promotion running and use additional marketing strategies to drum up traffic.
Alternatively, when it comes to a blog, do you see an increase in traffic when you post something new? If so, that can be a sign that you’re posting on topics that your visitors are interested in.
Why Are Visitors Coming to Your Voice Acting Website?
Whenever it comes to looking at analytics, the question of ‘why’ can be a tricky one to answer. This is because the data only shows you the numbers — not the motivation behind your visitors’ behavior.
However, analytics can give you the ability to see what people searched before they landed on your site, which can help you figure out which keywords are driving traffic.
How is Web Traffic Reaching Your Voice Acting Site?
One of the most important questions that analytics can help you answer is how visitors are getting to your site (e.g. through ads, through other sites, through search, through your newsletter). Understanding what marketing efforts are working can save you an incredible amount of time, energy and often money by helping you focus on what’s working.
Why You Googled Yourself — and Pay Attention to Keywords
If all of this analytics talk seems overwhelming, even something as simple as searching for yourself online and seeing where your site shows up in search results can help you become motivated in understanding how you can rank better.
Plus, certain analytics tools could help you figure out what types of demos people see, or if there is a topic that you’re coming up for, even though searchers aren’t clicking on your site. Those searches can generate ideas for new content.
By looking at a keyword tool like Google Keyword Planner, you may see that people are searching for character voices, medical narration, or a specific phrase like ‘funny cartoon voices.’ That can be a guide for how to label your demos. Making those phrases prominent on your website increases your chances of being found when potential customers are searching.
Tips for Setting Up a Web Analytics Account
Initially, you should set up your account to exclude your own traffic. When you want to see a change you made recently or to show your site to someone else, you don’t want that self-attributed traffic to affect your data and inflate your numbers.
It’s also a good idea to exclude spam. You can do this by searching for the latest analytics spam string and including that in your exclusions.
However, there are always new spammers popping up, so dealing with spam is an ongoing process. It has to be done retroactively.
If this sounds complex at first, be assured it’s likely that the process will get easier, and quicker, as you get more familiar with what you’re doing.
Choosing an Analytics Service and Implementing Change
When it comes to which service to use, that’s up to you. Paid or free, large company or small, regardless of your choice, you’re getting more actionable data than if you weren’t using any sort of tracking. Ensure you’re excluding yourself and spam so that your data is more accurate. There are also plenty of resources online to guide and teach you about how to use web analytics to get the data you want.
Regardless of the program you use, you’ll get a lot of data coming your way. The data is just an indication — how you interpret it is a whole other matter. Some of this data will be more useful to you than other parts of it, like search query data.
Once you’re tracking it, it’s up to you to see the data, interpret it, and implement change on your site.
Comments
I think that the basic knowledge of doing analytics online is necessary for everyone. In the age of online technologies, it is best to be prepared for every technological challenge life will throw at you. For example, I need to create a simple website for my students to get the updates on the learning process in time. After I had had some difficulties while I had to improve website traffic I decided to give the job to the people who are keen in this field. And I never regretted this decision.