KickstarterForum.org

Hey all,

Let's say I wanted to go out and advertise my project outside of Kickstarter. Perhaps I do a banner buy for 500K impressions. Maybe I get co-op placement in 10K emails some company is sending. Or I buy a paid editorial feature in some magazine talking all about my project.

My day job is in online marketing. With client projects, we're extremely watchful for points of "leakage". If we spend $2500 to drive traffic to a website or landing page, we assure that it doesn't have distractions or ads or links out to other sites. Otherwise, we've just paid for traffic that came and went. Landing pages/websites should be dead-ends that end at the "buy now/submit" button.

But if I go out and spend money on my KS project, I'm almost advertising Kickstarter itself and even other people's projects as much as I'm advertising mine.

My project could be fantastic. But people arrive and say "oh, Kickstarter...never been here...this is cool...let me have a look around!". Then I'm forgotten. This absolutely happens even with the most fantastic products. People are just curious. Thus - gotta stop that leakage. There is typically only a sliver that keeps you in the black with online advertising to start with. Costs mandate that you must get X number of "sales" to break even. If you've got people falling off left and right as they leave your page to go explore Kickstarter, you'd have to double what you ask for pledges to cover the costs of the advertising.

So why would anyone want to pay to advertise their KS project? It would seem that KS should split the cost of those ads. Of course, they won't do that. But since it so strongly benefits them if someone pays to advertise their project, you'd think that they might even have discounts available through partner advertising networks that we could use.

Plus, if they see a project that's suddenly getting a lot of traffic, you're telling me they wouldn't reward it in some way? Perhaps this is the unstated secret behind becoming a "featured project"?

If I spend money to advertise my project, I'm definitely advertising KS in general, and I'm actually advertising your project as well. The world goes round...perhaps the thought is that I'll receive that same exposure in exchange from other people who are heavily promoting their KS projects.

But that almost breeds laziness or complacency. It's human nature. Everyone assumes the other guy will do the heavy lifting so they sit back.

Anyway - my head is spinning a little on this one. But I think there's something to this we might all be able to wrangle or understand better.

Why don't you advertise a landing page for your project which ends in the "support on Kickstarter" button?

I knew we hired Mr. Briggman for something! Yeah, that one was staring me in the face....good call.

There is still some degree of leakage possible once they reach Kickstarter, but that would temper it a great deal.

Still a bit related to this all, whether KS admits it or not, you'd have to think they'd applaud or reward projects getting a lot of traffic. They must watch those stats. That's more exposure for KS overall.

Has anyone had experience with perhaps becoming a featured project, and they perhaps had mad-traffic to their project even before that?

Staff Picks are your reward for running an excellent, high traffic campaign.

I wouldn't worry so much about losing people to the rest of kickstarter's site. If you're targeting the right people, they've clicked your link because your project interests them. Just make sure your pitch is on point, and you'll keep their attention.