Everyone on the internet is vying for your attention - whether you intended it or not, you are too! The more eyes on your work, the better. The goal of analytics is to better understand the audience that views your artwork so that you can engage your audience better. This could mean catering your content to what’s popular, advertising more exclusively on specific social media channels, or even just better optimizing your website’s user experience.

For most people, these stats will lead to trying to improve sales. Artists are inevitably entrepreneurs who are trying to sell work to turn a profit. However, if your art is not the kind of work seeing sales but rather social action and change, analytics will help you see what things are causing people to take action (ex. A powerful webpage that motivates users to sign a petition, turn out for a rally, etc.).

Analytics will give you insight on:

1. Demographics: who your audience is and where they’re located.

2. Engagement: what keeps your audience’s attention, what sells / leads to action, how long they view your work.

3. User Acquisition: where people are finding your artwork from.

4. Tech Optimization: what devices & screen resolutions your audience uses.

I highly recommend watching this video in full.

It explains how to set up your GA account and teaches you what the menus mean. He is also dedicated to trying to help you find the most up to date information on GA. I have based the majority of the instructions on this tutorial. I have kept my written guide here in case video tutorials aren’t your fancy.

2. Go to “Access the Demo Account”. Click the link at the bottom of the section.

1. Who's looking at my work?

• Demographics: who your audience is and where they’re located.

• Using the "Overview" tab

2. What are the most popular works on my website?

• Engagement: what keeps your audience’s attention, what sells / leads to action, how long they view your work.

• Using the "Pages & Screens" tab

3. How are people finding my work?

• User Acquisition: where people are finding your artwork from.

• Using the "User Acquisition" tab

4. How do people view my work?

• Tech Optimization: what devices & screen resolutions your audience uses.

• Using the "Tech Overview" tab

Art is a strange commodity: buyers are not a heterogeneous group. The "Customer Profile" of art buyers varies drastically depending on the kind of art sold. Sometimes, it's just plain unpredictable.

I think once you're 'in art', you realize just how broad 'art' is. The outside tends to group it together, but it's really not categorically the same product. Unless the art market you're in is made up of distinctive people (for example, Gaming Fan Art Artists), chances are your audience won't fully fit into one or two neat boxes.

Analyzing demographics for your art will help you better optimize your social media, selling platforms, and messaging / advertising. You want to be where your audience is. Even if your audience is fairly unpredictable.

So what can we do with this information?

• The customer profile of your buyers / audience determines your selling venue / platform & how you market / engage with your audience.

Fine Artists likely will use:

Social Media

• Facebook if they are over the age of 30

• Instagram if they under the age of 29

• TikTok if they are under the age of 25 (especially under 20)

• Otherwise, they'll likely network more in real life through events, galleries, or friends.

Physical Selling Venues

• Booth set ups at local art fairs, major art fairs,

• galleries / artist run centers,

• other arts related community events.

• Wall space in coffee shops, vineyards, and other local businesses.

Digital Selling Venues

• Gallery like: Artfinder, SaatchiArt, Partial.gallery, etc.

• Craft sites: Etsy, etc.

• Independently: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, their own website.

Messaging / Advertising
Progress posts in stories, sometimes on the main feed. Video reveals are popular. Exact messaging depends on the audience and the style of the artist. A person who sells a lot to moms might post a lot of inspirational posts about progressing as a person, or paint their children.

Gaming / Pop Culture Fan Artists likely will use:

Social Media

• Instagram, TikTok with possible cross posting to Youtube.

• Deviantart, Behance, ArtStation as portfolio and networking sites.

Physical Selling Venues

• Anime / Gaming / Comic Conventions

Digital Selling Venues

• Some digital marketplaces, usually ones linked to the social media platform of choice.

• Often Independently: any of the aforementioned websites can lead to commissions.

• Independent website selling prints.

Messaging / Advertising
Short 30 second progress stories with commentary. Speed paints on Youtube. Constant posting of content is required. Many digital artists will hop on trend trains (ex. Bowsette, other new gaming characters). Some original characters, but often draws and sells fan art of popular characters in pop culture. Sells digital prints of digital artwork. Some digital artists are entering the NFT market.

The chart shows a simple ranked tier on the left side: the pages with the most amount of the metric measured goes to the top of the list, least amount of the metric goes to the bottom. By default, it's set to "Views" You can change the sorting criteria to one of the other measurements (ex. Users, Avg. Engagement time, etc.) by clicking the desired header.

So what can we do with this information?

• Depending on what you measure, you learn different things about the habits of your users on site.
  Views show what's most popular, but Average Engagement Time tells you what people are actually spending time on.

• Compare metrics against one another.
  In comparing metrics against each other, let's say 'views' versus 'most engagement time', we can see if our popular content also keeps people's attention the longest or if it's something else unexpected. What are the correlations?

Views Per User refers to the average amount of times that a user views the same page.

Example: There’s a painting in the hallway and each visitor stops to look at it. Some visitors view it more than once while they pass. Of the 4 people who have stopped in the hallway, the painting was viewed 6 times in total. The views per user average: 1.5.

So what can we do with this information?

• Do you retain the interest of your audience?
  A much better metric for seeing whether or not users return to view a specific piece of content regularly.

Average engagement time refers to how long the user had a focus on the webpage for in their browser.

Example: Each time someone stares at the painting in the hallway, you record how long they spend staring at it. You take all the times, add them together, and divide it by the number of times the painting was viewed to get the average engagement time.

So what can we do with this information?

• The more time spent staring, the better!
  Usually, the longer someone spends actively looking at something of yours in their browser, the better. It probably means they’re admiring your work and are a fan of it.

Note: the browsing habits of most people on the internet: there is a constant flood of images online, so people don’t tend to stare at one image for long. A low engagement time would not mean your artwork is unloved. The amount of views would better speak to popularity.

• Text heavy site? Longer engagement time equals more reading!
  If there is a text heavy portion of your site, a longer engagement time is certainly what you want.

Note: Keep in mind the average reading speed of people is 200-250 words per minute. If your article is 1000 words, then people would only spend 4-5 minutes max. Most would likely only get through ¼-½ of it, so adjust your expectations for this metric on that.

• By my View counts, I can tell the most popular article on site is the Cheap Online Portfolio. In the guide, the landing page, 1st, and 4th section are most viewed.
  

• Comparing my Users to New Users, I can tell I am retaining some of my audience.
  

• For the Cheap Online Portfolio, the user count drops off as it continues into the next sections. People aren’t following the guide in order, but rather picking what they want to read, or they aren’t getting further than the initial landing page.
  Perhaps this is because it is text heavy? Or the guide I’ve made is a big commitment to do and people’s attention span on the internet is small?

• Judging the Views Per User, I can see that users return to the Print Home Basics article the most viewed.
  

• The page with the most Average Engagement Time is the “4. Web Design & Portfolio Features”. I had advertised this page on Reddit in response to a user who didn’t know what their online portfolio needed to include. Perhaps Reddit is a good place to advertise my library articles because the user base is more likely to engage with lengthy, text based content. Additionally, they are searching for answers which guarantees engagement. After all, this is the basis of the site Reddit itself. What Reddit communities could I leverage besides r/ArtistLounge?
  

• While the above page has the most engagement time, users aren’t revisiting the page.

For an artist portfolio website, you will care most about:

1. New Users by User Source

2. Engaged Sessions

3. Average Engagement time

By comparing “Engaged Sessions” to “New Users”, we can understand whether or not our website is retaining the interest of visitors. While it’s entirely possible many new users are just web crawler bots looking for your email to send spam, it could also be that your website isn’t retaining the interest of users when they first land. If the scale is disproportionate, then you may need to adjust your website design.

By examining which user source creates the largest amount of “Engaged Sessions”, we can understand what medium is really building audience interest. Or, we can see where engagement is flopping where it should succeed. For example, if your newsletter isn’t engaging people as much as you want it to, perhaps the content or design isn’t interesting enough.

For an artist portfolio website, you will care most about:

1. Users by Screen Resolution

2. Users by Platform / Device Category

3. Users by Browser

When you’re building a website with Google Sites, it can be hard to tell what your website will actually look like across a host of devices (even if you use the preview tab). Ever been on one of those free flowing, endless websites that just feel terrible to navigate? We’re trying to avoid that.

If you have a high quality, high resolution screen, you might make assets bigger than most of your viewers can easily handle on their screen. Whatever the case is, you want to present your work in the best manner to the largest number of people.

Here, the majority screen resolution by far is 1366 x 768 pixels. I can change my screen resolution to this size and work on my site in these dimensions to create the best viewing experience.