After the first week of my Kickstarter campaign for Man Child I mentioned that Kickstarter project creators should expect to be in the dark due to a lack of analytics for project creators. Let there be light! Today Kickstarter introduced a new creator dashboard, which should be a tremendous help for anyone trying to figure out which of their fundraising efforts are, well, paying off.
That's my own project pictured above -- as with the cool project Kickstarter shared in their blog post, 75% of the funds for Man Child came from an external source (the largest of which was... yes, this web site!). One of the main things I found myself wondering during my campaign: which is a more effective platform for spreading the word, Facebook or Twitter? According to the newly available statistics on my project, Twitter narrowly came out on top with $8,412 raised via tweets versus $7,059 via Facebook status updates/likes/shares. Rather than help me figure out how my campaign went in hindsight, however, this new dashboard should be a tremendous help for anyone with an in-progress project. The scoop from the folks at Kickstarter:
The biggest addition to the Dashboard is referrals — where backers came from. The Dashboard features a table breaking down the top 25 backer referrers. Are backers coming from Facebook? Through a blog? Did they discover the project browsing around Kickstarter? How valuable was that celebrity's retweet? Now this is easily quantifiable.
I know Kickstarter is limited to U.S.-based creators, so for anyone who's run a campaign elsewhere -- IndieGoGo, for example -- are these kinds of statistics available on those platforms? I'm not trying to promote one platform over others, but Kickstarter happens to be the one I know and love (and am qualified to write about).
