How To Leverage The Kicktraq Hot List During Your Live Kickstarter Campaign

Critical Role 

Fans of the popular TTRPG web series Critical Role used Kicktraq to get updates on their smash-hit animated series campaign, The Legend of Vox Machina, back in 2019. 

The animated series campaign went on to earn over $11 million in funds and became one of the most-funded campaigns ever featured on Kickstarter.

This is just a taste of how crowdfunding trend-followers use Kicktraq. In short, it's a pretty great resource to utilize! 

Make sure to read to the end to find out what the gnomes of Kicktraq shared with the Crowdfunding Nerds about your frequently asked questions!

But first, let's dive into how you can use Kicktraq to benefit your campaign. 

Boost Your Project With Kicktraq

Ranking on the Kicktraq Hot List could boost your project during your live Kickstarter campaign. We use Kicktraq's "Daily Data" tab to quickly see our ad's effectiveness by comparing the daily backers against our ad spend. 

With an average of 100,000-150,000 page loads each day, Kicktraqt could be a welcomed traffic amplifier! 

Add Your Project To Kicktraq On Day 1

Insert your live Kickstarter URL into the Kicktraq search bar on the Homepage on day 1. This will automatically add you to their "Day-1 Projects" page at the top of the category navigation. 

The following determines how the Kicktraq Hot List ranks title: 

Kicktraq Users 

Kicktraq wants you to use your project's landing page on their site as the home of your community.

They want your audience to frequent this page to see how the campaign is doing and view campaign updates while sharing the page itself. So their Hot List is more to do with how the Kicktraq community engages with your project (or how much traffic you can bring to Kicktraq) than the projects on Kickstarter themselves. 

Kicktraq takes advantage of display advertising, so they have a financial incentive to get the most eyeballs on their site and reward the people who do so by listing them on their Hot List. 

Backers 

If your project is getting consistent backers and rising, you have a greater chance of getting on and staying on the Kicktraq backers list. 

You can use Facebook traffic ads to maximize a consistent stream of page views during a live campaign. Facebook ads are particularly useful during your mid-campaign slump, which will see a drastic drop in backers and traffic from the campaign's top and tail. 

Kickstarter Community Comments 

Make sure to engage your backers in the updates and comments tabs. Consider including a conversation question at the end of your updates to get people to chat about your project.

The volume of comments your project receives impacts the Kicktraq Hot List considerations. 

News Media 

Kicktraq wants your community to look up your project on their website. They have included a media feed to encourage this, displaying your campaign updates and other news. 

As reviews, interviews, and articles are created about your project throughout your campaign, you can update this media feed at the bottom of the page by tapping:

"If you have additional news that doesn't appear here, shoot us a link!" 

Your community updates will automatically be listed here too. 

Make Full Use Of Any Aid

If you successfully get listed on the Kicktraq Hot List, you can add their badge to your live Kickstarter page to communicate that your project is in high demand! You can download these images on their website here. 

Kicktraq Answers Your Most-Asked Questions!

Currently, Kicktraq does not yet have a robust system in place to obtain context-specific metrics for their site. However, they are working on an advertiser pilot to advertise Kickstarter projects exclusively and will have the metrics available then. 

Check out Kicktraq’s insights below:

What does Kicktraq do?

Kicktraq offers free analytics, news aggregation, and affordable advertising to help creators and backers connect.

How accurate is Kicktraq?

We report data we receive directly from Kickstarter. 

How to boost popularity on Kicktraq?

We've written an article about this you can find here. Enjoy!

How often does Kicktraq update?

It depends on where a project is in its Kickstarter lifecycle. Generally, once per hour.

Why are Kicktraq numbers different than Kickstarter?

See above.

How many hits does Kicktraq get?

Kicktraq gets an average of 100,000-150,000 hits a day.  

Kicktraq Example

Check out how we used Kicktraq to promote Deliverance around the 00:38:53 mark in the podcast below:

Have you had success leveraging Kicktraq? Let everyone know in the comments below what worked!