I think that research is an incredibly important element to running a successful Kickstarter campaign. If you want to achieve in any skill, you study and learn from those who have attained the level of results that you are looking to replicate. There is no sense in re-inventing the wheel.
In the past, I’ve gone to great lengths to share some helpful tips as to how any creator can go about researching similar campaign to set expectations and begin to build a marketing plan for their own Kickstarter project. With this post, I’d like to examine three research tools that you can use leading up to your campaign and how they differ from one another: Kicktraq, Kickspy, and Crowdlogs.
Alexa Traffic Rankings
Moz Scores (SEO score)
Comparing Two Campaigns
The first campaign I plugged in was the Zombicide: Season 3 Kickstarter which has raised $1.2 million to date.
Kickspy
Kicktraq
Crowdlogs
At an initial glance, all the software tools seem to be decently accurate. I really do like the low and high projections Kicktraq gives you. However, Kicktraq sets them trending towards $3 million on the first screen and $1.8-$2.4 million on the second screen (seems to be a discrepancy, unless I am mistaken).
Kickspy sets them trending towards $2 million and Crowdlogs does not offer trending analytics that I could find, though I do like their perk breakdown.
The second campaign I pulled was the now famous Potato Salad Kickstarter, currently at $44k. I pulled it because it has a strange funding path (dipped quite a bit recently) and I was curious as to how the analytics tools would measure that in terms of the amount it is trending towards.
KickSpy
Kicktraq
Crowdlogs
I found it strange that Kickspy was predicting a trend along the same lines of the current fundraising amount. I think the strangely shaped fundraising curve may have thrown it off. I found it interesting that the Kicktraq conservative estimate was $249,038 when it was trending towards $172k (granted, it is an experimental feature). Finally, Crowdlog’s numbers were way off in terms of funding.
My Thoughts
Ultimately, I think all of these tools can be helpful when researching a crowdfunding campaign and discovering trending products, but take them with a grain of salt.
It’s clear from the Alexa rankings and Moz score that Kicktraq is winning out in terms of traffic/authority. However, Kickspy has more sorting features and Crowdlogs offers analytics for more than just Kickstarter and also offers analytics at the “perk” or reward tier level.
I do think it’s also important to remember that the Kickstarter advanced discovery features allow you to search via category, cities, most funded, popular, recently launched, ending soon, and curated pages. You could use this to research projects and them plug them into one of the analytics tools.
Personally, I favor Kicktraq mainly because of the chrome app, which lets me quickly view analytics for each Kickstarter project I come across when I’m browsing. I don’t even have to be on the Kicktraq site. I just wish this was also available for other platforms! Finally, they also have good article curation on the homepage.
Which tool is your favorite? I also should have mentioned SideKick, but they don’t offer much in the way of graphs. Still, it’s worth checking out.
