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How to research Kickstarter campaigns

Whether you’re planning to be successful on Kickstarter or any other endeavor, it’s crucial that you research other individuals who have been successful in the same arena and what elements contributed to their success.

By researching similar Kickstarter campaigns using the steps below, you can determine the best source of pledges for your category, where you should concentrate your PR efforts, and how to best allocate your marketing budget.

Below I will analyze the Mogics Light – A Revolutionary Multi-functional Light campaign, which has shown more of a linear pledge growth model over the span of 60 days (talk about maintaining momentum!).

1. Use Kicktraq and Bitly to get an initial overview of the campaign’s analytics.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend installing the Kicktraq chrome app, which will allow you to quickly view analytics for any campaign that you come across on Kickstarter.

Mogics Light – Linear Growth Trend

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This information will give you a benchmark for your Kickstarter efforts. It seems like there was a big rush towards the end of the campaign and steady progress each day throughout the duration of the 60 days. There was an average pledge of about $1,000 per day and an average of 3 new comments added per day.

Next, you can take a look at the Bitly analytics for the Kickstarter short link by clicking the twitter share button on the project page, getting the short link, and then adding a “+” to the end, which yields “http://kck.st/1dJk91x+“.

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This information will give you an idea of where the traffic for a campaign came from and from which locations around the world.

2. Use Google To Find The PR They Attracted

By typing the title of the Kickstarter campaign into google and filtering by content type and time, you can create a media list of all the websites that a campaign managed to get on. You will also discover if the creator did any forum promotion or posted on any social bookmarking websites. I decided to search by the “custom range” of Feb 15th, 2014 to May 1, 2014 (two days after they ended).

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I’ve included some of the publications below that my search yielded.

http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/mogics-light

http://innovation.uk.msn.com/tomorrow/best-new-inventions-for-march?page=5

http://www.meecouk.co.uk/news-overview.php?news_id=181

http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/mogics-multi-functional-light-video-24-03-2014/

3. Research Social Sharing for the Campaign

Using KickTraq, you can get an idea of how many social shares this campaign got just from the social sharing widgets. You can also compare this to the data from the Bitly analytics in step #1.

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It shows this campaign got 407 Facebook likes and one tweet directly from the social sharing widgets. You can now try putting the campaign’s keywords into twitter advanced search and see what kind of Twitter response they received (who tweeted, how often during the campaign, etc).

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You could also put in the exact phrase “I just backed Mogics Light – A Revolutionary Multi-functional Light on…” to see which twitter accounts backed the campaign. I have blotted out the accounts for privacy purposes in the screenshot below.

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You can also check out the creator’s Facebook profile and, if the profile is public, see how frequently they were promoting the product.

4. Look Through Their Backers and Comments

By looking through their backers, you can get a sense of how many first-time Kickstarter backers they drove to the project vs. Kickstarter veterans that likely found from them from Kickstarter itself. From first glance below, it seems like they have a lot of traffic from the repeat-backer Kickstarter community. I have blotted out names/profile pictures for privacy reasons.

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As you can see, many of these backers have backed more than 20 projects. The information above will also give you a clue as to which physical demographics their backers come from. If you wanted to do a thorough job, you could copy all this information and paste it into a spreadsheet to get a complete rundown.

I’ve included an example below. It might take a few hours to sort all of the backers, but it will give you a complete picture of their campaign. Again, I have blotted out names and profile images, though this information is publicly available.

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I would also recommend looking through the campaign’s comments section, FAQ, and most popular reward tiers. This will give you an indication of what types of questions you need to anticipate, along with what the Kickstarter community actually liked about the project or video.

It seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised the number of people who also miss going through the updates section, which basically functions as a blog for the campaign. You can get a sense of how the creator adapted throughout the campaign and whether or not they decided to implement stretch goals.

5. Reach Out to the Creator!

Finally, you can always reach out to the creator to gain insight into their video views, video play completion rate, and pledge sources. You could also ask whether or not they’re planning to write a Kickstarter post-mortem like these campaigns.

In addition, you could invite them to do an AMA on our forum, as we always invite successful creators to kick it forward by providing tips and advice to up-and-coming creators.

My Question for You

Did you find this post to be helpful? Let me know in a comment below.

About Author

Salvador Briggman is the founder of CrowdCrux, a blog that teaches you how to launch a crowdfunding campaign the right way. ➤ Weekly Crowdfunding Tips