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As any kind of artist, you want the general public to experience your best work and, by attribution, have the best impression of your professional ability. When it comes promoting or distributing online, there’s no “A” for effort to just fulfill today’s expectation that you have something up. Online, tracking public behavior is just like reporting traffic on the 405 freeway — you can count cars over time, where they are, and how they got there. You want people to stick with it, en route to their destination with you. The question is that the work you have online, is it engaging the public or is, literally, a one hit wonder?

It’s a pain to understand traffic online beyond the over-valued sense of “hits.” It’s a pain to fire up Google Analytics for each and every one of your projects. When you send an e-mail out to your friends (and your fan club) about your latest and greatest creative work, it’s a pain to know whether or not your effort was a shot in the dark.

FWD:labs feels that pain. You need a painless truth to your sense of YouTube plays and MySpace views. You need clear terms and intuitive graphics that can inform your next decision to make quick improvements. This latest feature of FWDlabs.com informs you about your audience engagement.

When an artist signs in and adds a project, there is a traffic report for each one. Without any effort, the project is listed on the site, search engines find it, and your audience consumes it. With effort, you can tell if anyone click the link you added to Facebook. The goal is to clear up any thoughts that only a ringing phone or empty in-box mean you’re up or down. Knowing and adapting with the information might even increase your bottom line.

Before, if you ever wanted to know:

• How popular is my profile and each individual project?
• How is my site doing today?
• What’s the highest traffic this week for my project last year?
• Who linked to me or my work and how often?

Now, with traffic reports, you’ll know.

Engagement is not views racked up by browser reloads or geek-centric jargon. Engagement is founded by knowing that one Homo sapien visitor is one unique count, not ten pageviews or twenty “hits.” It’s knowing which link someone clicked to find you and checking out that link yourself. It’s knowing how you’re trending this week with a stock-line bar graph and your week’s high and low. It’s knowing you and your work are out there and about the people who seek it out: your audience.