KickstarterForum.org

stemcell wrote: ↑Sat Nov 16, 2019 11:58 pm I recently purchased the Pro GF plan and unfortunately it has been a disappointing experience. This post is not anti-gadget-flow, but I wanted to clear up some ambiguity surrounding GF features so others don't make the same foolish assumptions I did.

Full disclosure, I signed up for GF after my KS campaign was about a week in and almost successful already. I found out about GF when a rep emailed me to see if I wanted a boost. I did my research and liked what I read; plus I found a discount code (GIMME20 for 20% off if you decide to use them). My campaign was ultimately successful, so unfortunately, I think GF will add it to their stats showing my campaign became successful with their help, but in reality I've lost money using GF. Literally EVERY other promotional avenue produced more pledges than GF...a $100 FB ad, random mentions on reddit, etc.

My results have been abysmal. They advertise their average ROI is 3-15x and reach of 28M people/month. I spent $2000 and now at the end of my promotion period, GF has been responsible for $337 from 7 KS pledges—a loss of $1663, my ROI is 0.17x. Sure, this could be my fault for having a bad campaign...so let's look at the metrics to find out.

Unfortunately, GF metrics are nonexistent. I signed up in large part because of the glowing review on Hyperstarter. In this post, after testing the GF basic plan for a KS campaign, they ambiguously state their Gadget Flow Analytics include: page views, impressions, clicks, and ROI. I thought this meant Analytics [provided by] Gadget Flow. Be aware, the ONLY metric GF provides is clicks. I contacted support to find out where the impressions were to know what % of viewers were clicking to find out how effective my post was and they told me "there is no way to track ad impressions". On the contrary, I can't think of a single online ad I've ever bought that doesn't track impressions. The pro plan estimates 800K to 1.2M impressions. But without the data to back it up, plus their apparent inability to track impressions, those numbers could just be made up. My clicks after 2 weeks is at 3795, which after peaking on day 8 I'm now seeing about 15-30 clicks a day. In the meantime, I've almost doubled my campaign goal using other promotions.

Furthermore, the Revenue and Est. Revenue display N/A and/or Coming Soon. At first I foolishly took this as meaning "not enough data yet, but after a few days this data will populate". Nope. This means this feature is planned for the future and they've already reserved prime space in the dashboard. Revenue & Estimated Revenue is not a feature. Yes, you can find GF's pledges in your KS dashboard, they are combined with all other custom referral pledges. So if you're using multiple custom referrers, you have to sift through pages of referral sources to separate out GF pledges to calculate GF revenue. Tedious.

The only upside I can see is that they'll leave the post on their site and social media even after my promotion has ended. So maaaaaybe over a long enough time, and if I continue to sell my product after the KS, sales may trickle in and I may one day break even.

GF probably works great for many campaigns but this was my first-hand encounter. I'm not looking for an apology or anything, I just wish I knew then what I know now, and maybe my $1600 loss will benefit someone else.

patxi wrote: ↑Wed Nov 27, 2019 11:17 am I hired the standard plan, over $550 and got 800 clicks in over 3 weeks and