On Demand Dance Workouts

I’ve been in the digital analytics space for 10+ years but kickstarting a business is new to me. When I decided to launch Hip Shake Fitness on kickstarter, I noticed that most posts are about how this installation is executed.  What I want to talk about today is actual reports that you can create and how it has helped me in improving our marketing strategies for kickstarter and the future site.       If you haven’t installed Google Analytics integration in your Kickstarter campaign, I highly recommend starting with Braden Heckman’s How To Use Google Analytics to Raise More Money on Kickstarter.

How Did I Track My Different Web Properties?

Before we launched kickstarter for our online dance workout site, we had 5 different online assets: (1) our website, (2) youtube, (3) facebook, (4) instagram and (5) twitter.  Plus kickstarter – that’s 6 (ugh).  So many things to optimize, so little time.

Google Analytics: Website, Kickstarter & YouTube

We used Google Analytics tracking for my website, kickstarter and YouTube.  They were all setup under 1 account but I used 3 different properties so my admin page looks like this.

UTM Tracking: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

UTM’s are such an old school way of tracking traffic. The nice thing about it is it just works. A UTM is a simple code that you can append to the end of the URL to determine the source of the traffic. For Social Media, we used 3 UTMs  ( Source / Medium / Campaign). If you’re not familiar with UTMs, learn about UTM tracking from the Launch Digital Marketing blog. Facebook was the most complicated channel for us. I wanted to show our UTM structure so you can get an idea of how this works. Below are the source and mediums we used for facebook. We used campaigns to track traffic for our different “marketing ideas.”  For example, anytime we talk about our testimonials, we used realwomen as the campaign value.  When we talk about our dance instructors we used dancers as the campaign value. So our final URL will looks something like this  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/musicscenester/hip-shake-fitness-your-online-dance-fitness-studio?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=owned&utm_campaign=realwomen     Before I forget, if you haven’t pledged on our kickstarter campaign, please do so! We are 70% funded and we have 12 days towards our goal. PLUS the next 10 pledges get an automatic upgrade.

How Detailed Social Media Tracking Helps

Below is an example of the data in google analytics that we were able to get. SHOCKER (not) my personal page posts have the highest conversion rate and our facebook owned pages was #2. Our ads suck and facebook group posts wasn’t doing much. We could also dig deeper to each medium and see what marketing effort was working. Our very first post about going live drove most of the transactions, everything else was meh.

Tracking Paid Traffic

The goal of kickstarter to me was to sell the product before beta so we could get a temperature of how it would work when we actually launch it. It’s like having an alpha without building and hopefully, raising some additional funds to get you through a few more months of the startup phase. Therefore, it was natural for me to think about sending paid traffic. This was a good test of if we can convert people who had no idea who we are just by showing them our page.     We haven’t completed my traffic buys yet so we won’t provide that analysis but we do want to talk about the method of tracking these campaigns:

Facebook Traffic Buys

We tracked this on it’s own source (facebook), medium (paid) & created different campaigns and content based on the way we structured our paid buys. So our facebook paid campaign URL looks something like this:   ?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=chicago41&utm_content=happydancer   I also made sure that we only bought traffic on facebook desktop and mobile and only on the feed. As a default, facebook adds instagram and other partners on my buy and I don’t want that. If we decide to buy traffic on instagram or other partners, we will want to track that separately.

Adwords Buys

This one was really tricky. You can buy traffic directly to your kickstarter campaign, however, you can’t track what keywords or ads are working. I have Google Analytics and Adwords integrated on my account. When you buy directly to your kickstarter page, the only thing you see is source medium google / cpc. Which doesn’t help you optimize!   I also tried appending the campaign and keyword data on the keyword URL but that doesn’t work either! Somehow, the UTM data just gets stripped off and you only track certain keyword not all.   I’ve decided to re-launch my campaign and send traffic to my site instead.  I am tracking the clicks to the “pledge on kickstarter button.”  At the end of the day, I’d rather get an idea of what keywords are working then just sending a block of traffic that I won’t learn anything from.  I’ll let you know how this goes.

Rewards Levels That Are Working Best

For my specific campaigns, the 2 reward levels that people love the most are $25 and $100. I highly recommend having those pledge levels available when you launch your own kickstarter campaign! I’d love to hear what you think and learn about your own experiences. Feel free to share your input in the comments below! – Charlene