Unscrambling Kickstarter Referral Metrics
Lessons learned from day 1 of the Make 100 Egg-Centennial
I ran a Make 100 project on Kickstarter to cook and pop 100 eggs in Brooklyn. Find out what that is and why I’m so excited to make breakfast for 100 lucky folks. I’m also using this project to illustrate some points I made in my Kickstarter Creator Hangout video on how to create and promote projects.
In a short series of posts, I hope to illustrate how I personally build community through social media, metrics, and straight up talking to people. It sounds like a lot of time and effort but it’s worth it to me (and to the success of my projects!). If you have any questions or use any of my advice, tweet me @Randwiches.
Compared to many Kickstarter projects, this one is quite small with a $500 goal. While it might not exactly scale to your million dollar idea you are planning, it might help to understand how referral traffic works and distributes over the course of a campaign. After one day, we landed with 32 backers with pledges totaling $301; which is 60% funding.
These numbers are neither guaranteed, nor required. It is okay if you got no backers on your first day, but all that planning for your story and rewards are just the beginning. Campaigns are living things that need attention. The numbers above are the result of a lot of community and authority building on my part for over ten years. It’s not managing a Twitter for ten years but practicing the thing, in this case — cooking, and becoming known for it. I do not mean being ‘famous,’ but when my friends have a soft egg at breakfast they text me a photo or video of them sticking their fork in it. My community is so aware that I love popping egg yolks that they actively seek to engage with me about it.
Many marketers will refer this phenomena as a ‘strong personal brand,’ I feel gross saying so but it’s true. By dissecting my Kickstarter referral traffic, you’ll see what I mean and how I got there.
On Kickstarter, a Referrer is where a backer navigated from to convert to a pledge. It could be a specific website, social platform or from somewhere inside Kickstarter’s sitemap. For fellow creators, you can visit this screen by logging in to your Kickstarter account, visiting an active project and clicking on Dashboard. Scroll to Referrers.
My top three sources of pledges come from places that I spend the most time promoting what I do as a caterer and blogger.
Twitter is where I share food articles I’ve read and react live in chats or promote my individual blog posts. It’s also where I spout the most random knowledge or ask questions, it’s me, not a bot. But, I’m not physically there all the time because I go to work on weekdays and sleep at night.
How the heck do I appear so present all the time? I accomplish this with a few tools:
Flipboard — Full disclosure: I work at Flipboard. But I genuinely use it to build expertise about cooking. How? I read, a lot. Like, every morning. I follow topics like recipes, eggs and cheese to populate my Cover Stories, then flip through every day for 15 to 20 minutes on my phone. I save stories I want to read later in a private magazine that no one can see.
Once a week, mostly Saturday mornings, I go through my private Flipboard magazine of articles I haven’t read yet. They get sorted into either public magazines or they go to…
Buffer — I have an automatic queue to Twitter of articles I’ve read with emoji or my opinion attached to them. It doesn’t publish in a stream all at once, but three specific times during the day that I chose. It’s my form of endorsement, but also showing, “Hey, I’m interested in this. Let’s talk about it!”
Hootsuite — Is how I manage my multiple Twitter accounts from my computer. Besides mentions, I can see what content has been retweeted (write/share something like that again!). Hootsuite has an “autoschedule” feature so I can sit down once a week to pre-write and plan original content complementary to my Buffer stream.
Facebook is where I cross post untagged Instagram media 1) because the copy looks weird if you’re like “Thanks to @myfriendjoe for the pie! #pie #omgpie.” and 2) it displays the photo and video, versus Twitter displaying just a link. I also share links to my new blogs posts and share events. It’s not a daily activity but monthly. Most of my family is on Facebook and not Twitter, so this is where they seek me out.
What’s missing from this Referrers list is my Instagram account. It is the social media account with my most followers. However, its absence tells me it isn’t a good source of action from my particular audience (remember my postulate: everyone drinks a difference social media cocktail). Instagram is still a place where I show all of my work cumulatively but I know not to rely on it for this campaign. Cross posting allows me to take advantage of the photo I already took and hyperlink it to my Kickstarter campaign.
Kickstarter’s ‘Following Back’ Feature. On many social media channels, there is a ‘find your friends’ feature meant to connect you to people you care about. To find this, log in and click on your profile photo. Under My Stuff, select Follow Facebook Friends or Follow Creators.
You get an email when a friend launches or backs a project. I find this incredibly helpful. I get to be the first to see and support my friends when they embark on or back a new creation. Conversely, it’s an automatic blast to your followers to rally them to the front lines. Unless you are friends with a lot of daily active backers, it doesn’t feel spammy. It’s one of the few email notifications that I open up and read. If email is not your thing, view your Activity tab on the Web.
A common question I hear is “How do I get featured on Kickstarter?”
You’ll see on my referral list that it is listed as #6 and not a huge driver of pledge money. It’s a nice to have and to celebrate when you have an active campaign but I wouldn’t waste my time begging to get a feature (not a good look, anyway). It’s a nod from Kickstarter’s team. ~hit play on the video from Groove~
It may seem like a lot of work to build a social media channel but there are a few things to know. All of these services are free and it’s not like I am toiling a whole day on them. It’s 15 minutes in the morning and up to an hour on Saturday morning. Look at the impact it made on my first day!
So you’ve launched a campaign and you’ve made your first backer update. You’re waiting for the pledges to come in and it’s a little slow. Take a look at your referrals and double down on your top three sources. If you’ve already done that, look at the rest of the list and see how you can spread the word.
Here’s a handy guide to what each referrer is:
Kickstarter other — Somewhere else within the sitemap that isn’t a main navigation portal like the featured areas or search. There is no way to influence this.
Search — Your project came up in a search result on Kickstarter. Either a backer was looking specifically for you or a project in a category they like to support. If a friend can’t find your project, they will search. But you should ensure your friends know where to find you and how to support you when you launch a project.
Featured — Kickstarter HQ put you in a blog or feature page. Their team is constantly scouring active campaigns on their platform or on social media. In this case, they put out a public call for Make 100 projects. I don’t speak for them but I think they like campaigns that create unique experiences, have focus, are spelled correctly, have great videos, and interesting rewards. There is no formula, but that is what has worked for me. My campaign is currently featured in Make 100.
Activity Feed — Someone follows you and clicked on your campaign link. Make sure your friends know to follow you on Kickstarter before you launch.
Direct, no referrer information — Someone visited the link directly, not from email, Kickstarter or social media. It could be an app, incognito browser or copy/pasted URL.
Advanced Discovery — Someone clicked on Explore and then chose a listing within the Discovery navigation of Kickstarter. It’s more browsing and clicking around compared to Search. My campaign shows up when you click on Explore > Food > All Food Projects. Ensure that your project is listed under a specific category, some larger ones may be saturated. Mine is under Food > Small Batch.
Kickstarter Emails — Someone clicked on a link from Kickstarter HQ. Again, not something you can ask for.
Push — Someone has the Kickstarter app on their phone or tablet and was notified that you launched a campaign.
To recap: Referrers are how your backers navigated to that ‘Back This Project’ button. Understand what they are and prioritize how you will communicate throughout the campaign’s life, not just at the beginning.
In another post, see how I actually talked about my project to get backers on board.
