KickstarterForum.org

sbriggman wrote: ↑Wed Aug 07, 2013 10:24 pm

drlouisechughes wrote: I would say about half of my backers are people I know so far, half I don't. While I am trying to remain positive, I am not sure this is going to be successful, but I will try my hardest to make it so. You will spend a lot of time on the project, both in building the actual page and video and much more in the work that follows the launch. Work out the best time of year as well. I considered a few angles but on reflection there are a few that I should have taken into account and worked around them. I will know for next time, this will not be the only project I do via this method.

Some great tips here! Just from listening to campaign creators speak about their projects, doing interviews, and studying campaigns, I'd like to add that one takeaway is usually a lack of one of the two (or both):

1. Bad conversions
2. Low Traffic

Bad conversions means that if 1000 people visit your campaign page, 100 of those people watch the video, and only 1 pledges at a $5 tier, that's a pretty low conversion rate. It makes it harder for the project to take off. The ratio is 1000 unique views : $5 pledged.

You can improve this conversion rate by examining where your traffic is coming from (relevancy) and getting feedback to optimize your writing/video communications, along with your reward tier offerings.

At the end of the day, conversions to me say - how many people want this? If you have a game campaign and get featured on an independent gaming publication and only get 1 pledge out of 1000 people, that could be a bad sign. I would start with 1. driving relevant traffic 2. Examining how many people are willing to support the campaign and at which tiers to give an indication of why they are supporting it 3. Retooling to focus your campaign better to this audience and re-do the process of driving more traffic.

Low traffic is the biggest complaint I receive. Most people think they have a great campaign, that it resonates well, but they just can't get enough traffic to the campaign. For example, if you have 1000 people visit your campaign, 500 of those people watch the video and 250 of those people pledge an average of $25, those are some awesome conversion rates. You would have brought in $6,250 in pledges.

To me, it would make sense to pay for advertising or marketing/pr to get another 1000 people to check out your campaign, as long as the cost doesn't exceed the $6,250-cost of production, but recognize it will eat away at your margins. As an example, if you used a $1 per click model and drove another 1,000 people for $1,000, you could get a decent return on your investment, assuming your costs aren't too high.

As a final thought: I will try to come up with more concrete examples as to how to DRIVE traffic and how to measure conversion rates in a future article on CrowdCrux. In my experience, it's best measured over time. It's hard to drive 4,000 people to a website or product page in a single day unless you have an established following, but over time (a month), you can drive larger amounts to a page more easily than you might think with hard work and consistent effort.