KickstarterForum.org

For the campaign I worked on, I utilized this hack, but I'm still unsure whether it's against terms of service on Facebook.

So my question:

Have any of you utilized 301-re-directs to track your ROI on Facebook Ads? As you may already know, organic and ad results do not show "conversions" in Kickstarter analytics. All it says is "Facebook"...so while the ads will let you know how many people clicked, there is no way to do conversions, unless you make the link 301.

In other words, you make the link in the ad go to a unique page. Like www.12345.com. In your hosting provider, you "301 re-direct" www.12345.com to the Kickstarter project page. If there is a pledge, it is shown as coming from www.12345.com

We ended up going through an ad agency instead of pushing budget into this, but this was my work around.

Has anyone else tried this or any other method to tracking ROI from Facebook ads?

I think it's fine to track a url from a 301 redirect, I don't see the problem. I've noticed alot of KS urls have ref=xx on the end, it makes it easier to track too.

You can use google analytics to track ROI from FB (or anything else) - and I'll tell you I've dropped over 500$ in FB adds and tried every combination of target audiences and image content that would seem appropriate.

I've gotten TONS of clicks to my kickstarter but ZERO conversions.


To track conversions from FB ads here is what I did.

1. Setup Google Analytics I used this guide here, Follow all of it, it'll be worth it.
http://www.kickstarterbible.com/verses/ ... -analytics

2. Make some custom URLs for your ads, you will use these to track how effective your different ads are. Use this.
https://support.google.com/analytics/an ... 3867?hl=en
-Set your campaign source to "Facebook" or "Google Ads" "Reddit" or whatever you use to advertise
-Set campaign medium to "CPC" "CPM" "Ad" or whatever you use...This isn't really important for anything so don't stress if you don't understand what to put here
-Campaign Term I've just left blank..
-Campaign Content, this is where I put it a descriptive word for the type of ad i'll use this link for.. For instance lets say i put 2 Ads on FB - "Ad1" and "Ad2" I would then generate 2 URLs with this builder. One for each.
-Set Campaign Name to "Kickstarter"

3. Make ads, and drive traffic to the URLs you made.

If conversions are made on THOSE URLs you'll see the conversions in the ecommerce section of your google analytics dash board.


Good luck and if you (or anyone) want to return the favor please let me know what you did to properly target people and convert people with your FB ads. Because from what I personally can tell. They get you tons of clicks but no conversions.

Mint wrote:You can use google analytics to track ROI from FB (or anything else) - and I'll tell you I've dropped over 500$ in FB adds and tried every combination of target audiences and image content that would seem appropriate.

I've gotten TONS of clicks to my Kickstarter but ZERO conversions.

This topic is quite old but I'd like to mention sth to newcomers. I just bought and finished the "Seven Figure raising course" from Bryce, who raised over 1M for his Ravean jacket (absolutely worth the money! And better try it at least few months before you launch!). For FB ads he said the same - he was throwing money on garbage until he realized that in order to have success with them, the target audience MUST KNOW WHAT CROWDFUNDING IS.
That being said, he tried to target only and only 3 interest groups: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Crowdfunding. Nothing else. No interest connected to the nature of his product. And it was the first time he saw tons of conversions. I'd personally add to that "Men only", USA filter and you can play with their age.

Boosting a post can be 5-10 times cheaper than an ad.

And one advanced strategy - if there is a product, similar to yours, which has been a huge success on Kickstarter, in the interest fields type only its name. E.g., for playing cards - "exploding kittens". This way you kill two birds with one stone - you target an audience which has the interest in playing cards, but also obviously knows what is Kickstarter and uses it.

Track all ads conversions by using a redirects from subdomains. Only this way you can get 100% acurate tracking of it. And make small experiments, 20 USD max. When you see a nice convertion ratio (he said 4X is doable), push hard on it and invest a lot of money. It's important to make it the first days, projects which get funded the first 3 days go much higher in the search results for the whole remaining period.

Hope the above helps someone. Good luck!