Hey everyone! I decided to write another post about Kickstarter because there was just so much to do today! I don’t know if I’ll be writing a post for every day or not, but I potentially might if there are still things to do every day. Find the Kickstarter page here!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/975340335/daggers-highschool

1. Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are really intuitive and easy to use, and best of all it is pretty affordable. For the next 4 days, I’m spending $5/day to gather data and hopefully generate some clicks. The main thing I wanted to know was whether the age group of 14-24 or the age group of 24+ would be more likely to click on the Kickstarter page. Based on yesterday’s post, I actually figured that the age group 24+ would generate more clicks, given that there are way more people who are older than 24 on Facebook (at least, I think so…) and also because I included the price on the ad, which I figured would discourage students from backing.

Wow, was I wrong! I was surprised to see that the ad was not only more popular among ages 13-17 than any other age group, but that women across the board were more responsive to the ad. This might not seem too surprising until you consider the fact that most people interested in board games are men. Of course, I don’t have a ton of data yet, so I’m taking this with a grain of salt. What I do know though is that according to this study by Ant Lab Games, women tend to enjoy heavily thematic games more than men. If this isn’t just a statistical anomaly, I believe that the theming of Daggers High could be the reason behind the difference.

All in all, Facebook Ads didn’t result in any backers, (at least, as far as I can tell) and it resulted in only 4 link clicks. That being said, I’m paying a reasonable $5/day for some very interesting data. The other nice thing is that the ads will only get smarter over time as the machine algorithm learns how to target the ads even better!

2. Kickstarter Updates

Growth has slowed down after the first day, which always a bit worrying but to be expected. I’m super grateful that the campaign has had a fairly substantial second day of funding, and looking forward to seeing whether that number will increase or not after pay day! It seems that the number of backers from Kickstarter itself has been pretty low, and that most of them found the campaign through social media posts. In terms of referrers, Facebook was king:

Another interesting thing is that the project has 96 followers. This is a good sign (I think) as it means that there are a lot of people who want to get notifications about the game as time goes on:

It was especially cool to see that the project video has been getting a lot of plays! I believe that the completion rate of 53.42% is quite high, but I’m not sure about that. Regardless, for a home-made video with animations made frame-by-frame with Gimp and iMovie, this was much better than I could have anticipated:

3. More Emails

Ok, so I have a tiny, tiny, tiny mailing list of about 55 people. That being said, they are pretty much all people who gave me their email at a convention, as I only recently started gathering email addresses off of the blog and other areas. We see that in the data:

Given that my test emails went straight to my spam folder, I wasn’t expecting much out of my mailing list. But it turned into a whooping 47.9% open rate, which is fantastic! It’s hard to say how many of these turned into backers, but I’m mostly just glad that the mailing list was surprisingly effective. Another way I’ve been sending emails is through writing updates for my project, which sends a notification to all of my backers:

Kickstarter updates are a great way to engage backers, but I mostly write them because I really enjoy sharing new stuff about the game! There was only so much that could fit on the main campaign page, so I hope to be populating the updates with more cool stuff as time goes on. If you want to read the update, you can check it out here! It also gave way to my first comment:

Thanks for the reminder Japheth! It’s time for me to go out and share this post, and you can help by clicking on the social media buttons on the bottom of this article! What did you think of the data from Facebook Ads? Were you as surprised as I was? Let me know in the comments below, and thanks for reading!