I raised over £100k on Kickstarter. Here’s how it went - Part 1

I’ve just finished my seventh Kickstarter campaign and it’s been my most successful to date.

By the end of the campaign it was the most backed playing card project on Kickstarter and the 13th most backed project out of the 3,453 live projects at the time.

13th out of 3,453 - top 0.4%

Next week when I’ve had time to review the campaign I’ll share more about why I think it was a success and why it did better than my previous campaigns.

For now I’ll share a brief overview of the project backing.

Where did my backers come from?

Kickstarter breaks down funding sources into three top-level categories:

1. Pledged via Kickstarter

2. Pledged via external referrers

3. Pledged via custom referrers

Final funding summary

You can see from the chart above that just under half of my backers were attributed to Kickstarter and just under half to custom referrers.

The rest (10%) came from external referrers, and of those nearly all are classed as Direct traffic no referrer information, which effectively means I don’t know where they came from. It would obviously be nice to know more about them, but I’m happy with how small a percentage that is.

It’s worth noting that these attributions are imperfect. Referral links are designed to figure out where a backer comes from based on where they found your project, but that can sometimes get messy if people see your project in several places over time.

Let’s look into those three categories in a bit more detail.

Pledged via Kickstarter

This covers people who found your project within the Kickstarter ecosystem.

It’s all automated by Kickstarter and you can’t control it. Some classifications are more granular than others. For example my biggest single referral source was Kickstarter>Search, but I don’t know any more details, such as what people were searching for.

Another one that did well for me is much more specific: Kickstarter>Email: last chance to back reminder. This is when people had saved my project, received an automated email from Kickstarter reminding them about it, and then they clicked through and backed my project.

In total, I had 47 separate specific Kickstarter referral classifications, but some with only a single backer via them.

If you want to see this in action go to the Kickstarter homepage and click on any of the projects shown there. When you go through to the project page you’ll see something like “?ref=section-homepage-featured-project” at the end of the URL. If you then back that project, the project creator will see that someone backed their project after seeing it on the Kickstarter homepage.

Pledged via external referrers

As I mentioned earlier, for my project these were nearly all Direct traffic no referrer information, which means what it says.

There are a few ways this could happen. People could manually remove a referral link before visiting the Kickstarter project page. Or maybe someone shared the project with someone without a referral link. Or it’s quite likely that if a blog or other site shared my project then they didn’t use the referral link I sent them. This is where using a third party analytics tool such as Google Analytics can give you more insight into your campaign.

The remaining 1% here is shown as various sources such as Google, Bing, and some other search engines.

Pledged via custom referrers

This is the one you control and which is probably the most interesting and useful.

I’m sure some creators just ignore this feature and you’d get nothing attributed to this category. In fact I don’t think it was even possible to add custom referrers when I ran my first Kickstarter campaign almost ten years ago.

All my custom referral links were either created by me, or by Jellop, a third party marketing company I used for online paid marketing.

Looking at Jellop first, those show, for example, which specific Facebook ads resulted in backers reaching the Kickstarter page. There are quite a few of these because the advertising is measured, refined and updated over the course of the campaign.

Then there are the ones I created - over 50 in total. These cover things like the specific links I used when sharing the campaign via various social media platforms. I also used unique links for newsletters and project updates. And, as I mentioned earlier, I created unique links for each pitch to journalists and bloggers, even if these don’t always get used.

There’s a very long tail of these custom referral links. You can go to the effort of creating many of them to increase your insight into what’s going on, but then some may well never directly link to a backer at all.

…

It’s great to be able to see where backers came from, and reviewing this data goes a long way to helping me improve every new project.

Next week I’ll share my analysis of how this project compared to my previous ones and how I made it my most successful Kickstarter campaign yet.

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