I’m sure that many artist’s check their monthly website statistics to see what kind of traffic they are getting. Hopefully they’re aware that they should pay no attention to the “hits” statistic because it doesn’t mean anything. They’re instead looking at unique visitors and how many page views they have on average. So how can they use this data to predict and plan for sales goals?

Assuming the site already has a number of different items for sale, including albums, single tracks, ringtones, merchandise, fan club, etc., then they already can figure out how much each visitor to their site is “worth”.

For example, if 500 unique visitors came to your site yesterday, and judging by a “industry standard” 2 % conversion rate (the rate of visitors that turn into buyers), that would equal 10 customers.

Hopefully you already have an “average amount spent” number (that’s where you take the total sales total in a given period of time and divide it by the number of customers). Let’s say the average money spent is $14. Multiply by the number of customers, then you have an average of $140 in sales per day.

A buck forty a day equals $4200 per month in sales. After subtracting your costs (and operating expenses), you’ll end up with a profit. Well, unless of course your expenses are more than that.

The point is, we were able to determine a sales figure based on the number of unique monthly visitors. 500 visitors per day (15000 per month) = $140 per day ($4200 per month).

Now you can set a sales goal and track your development as you promote the website online. For example, you could set a sales goal of $20,000 sales in one month. How many unique visitors will we need? Answer: 2500 per day (75,000 per month).

Now you can have an idea of where you need to be going in terms of traffic. Watch the stats daily to pay attention to where your traffic is coming from? Are you receiving any traffic from MySpace? Google? ReverbNation?

Where the traffic is coming from, and where it goes is important. If you pay attention to the stats and see what works, you can have a better idea of where to focus your efforts at, so you can drive more traffic and inch closer to the sales goal.

These are just some very basic uses of your website’s analytics. As you business grows, you’ll learn how to play even deeper into the statistics sand box, and learn how to do things like increase your site’s conversion rate (a small increase can change your sales significantly). You’ll do this by testing different ways of organizing the layout, content, and navigation of your website to help make the sales process flow better. And each move will be tracked using your sites stats.

Congratulations. You’ve just learned some headache-inducing “Web Analytics 101″. And if you plan on making in it this industry, you’d better start understanding how it works.