We're excited today to release a new Project Dashboard for creators. This update introduces several new pieces of data to give creators insight into their backers and pledges. The Dashboard is available to project creators via a navigation bar when viewing their project:
To illustrate the Dashboard we asked David Carr and John Kestner from the Twine project if we could share their information, and they graciously agreed. Thanks David and John!
First on the Dashboard is the overall funding graph, which most creators will recognize (it's been around for a while). This gives a big-picture view on how funding has progressed. To see the project's totals on any given day, simply mouse over that point on the graph. Note the green line indicating the original project goal.
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.
The table includes the domain source, the number of pledges from that source, the dollar amount pledged, and the percentage of total dollars. Note that this is specifically tracking pledges, not general traffic. Referrers are split between backers from within Kickstarter (the green entries) and external links (the white entries). The referrer table is also sortable; you can even use the shift key to sort across multiple columns. In the case of Twine, the top sources of pledges include a direct link (likely via email), Twitter, Endgadget, and Kickstarter's search.
To give you a big-picture sense of where your pledges are coming from, the Dashboard features a pie chart breaking down pledges from within Kickstarter and outside of it, as well as your project's average pledge amount.
The Dashboard also breaks down the popularity of each reward tier. If you hover over one of the bars you’ll see what percentage of dollars came from each tier.
We’re really excited to launch this feature, and we look forward to your feedback. If you’ve launched a project since May 2011 (when we began tracking pledge referral data), you can visit your Project Dashboard to check your stats.
Look for more updates to this page in the future, and if you haven't already, head to the Start page to get started on your own project. Thanks!
Comments
These are all AWESOME changes and things we wished we'd had when we were doing our campaign! Good job, guys. Go go gadget team!
It looks fantastic, nice job team!
Great additions to the platform. Also nice to see the Twine project getting even more deserved attention.
This is what I was waiting for a long time! Makes Crowdfunding so much more professional!
Just what I always wanted.
I like it.
nice, but when the pledger get a better dasboard?
i like to sort the starred and pledged projects by project finish date (and not by date when it starred)?
i know this is rocketsience because we wait a long time for this!
Brilliant job... this will only get better too.
Fantastic update! Looking forward to using this new dashboard in a few days when we launch our campaign.
I can't wait! This looks like it will really give me a grasp of something that feels scary to dive into.
This is an awesome addition to the site.
It would be nice to include the number of actual referrals per referrer source - that would allow the user to determine the conversion probability (total pledges via the referrer / total visits via the referrer). While the absolute number is very useful, the relative metric can also be quite helpful.