Get Kickstarter Analytics Data From Kicktraq

With so much data available on just about anything you can think of when it comes to social media and the web, the one area that's come up short in that regard has been crowdfunding, as up until now there were no serious analytical tools available. Now that looks to be resolved with a sort of Google Analytics tool for Kickstarter called Kicktrag.

Kicktraq allows you to see inside a campaign in more detail than ever before. You can see the Funding Progress over time, the Pledgers and Backers by day, how the campaign is trending, and the final projections for it. Check out one of the data screens below.

While I'd like to see how much progress each pledge level is getting as well, Kicktraq still gives you a better idea of exactly where you're at during the campaign than what was available before. Remember that as little as a single tweet can make the difference in the outcome of a campaign. Now you can actually see its effect when it happens.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Website Performance Metrics

One of the things about Music 3.0 is that we can finally measure exactly what the buzz is. Here's a way to interpret your Google Analytics data to see just how successful you website really is. Thanks to Hubspot for the definitions.


1. Unique Visitors - That's the total number of individual visitors to your site during a specific period of time, not counting repeat visits by the same individual. Obviously, if this number continues to increase, you're doing well.


2. New versus Repeat Visitors - This is a comparison of your unique visitors vs. the number of visitors who came back more than once. Although it's great to have repeat visitors (and you really need them), a rate higher than 30% means that you're probably not growing your audience quickly enough.

3. Traffic Sources - This is a breakdown of the specific sources of traffic to your website. There are two - Organic traffic comes from a link found on a search engine results page. Referral traffic comes from a link on another website. This tells you how well your search engine optimization is doing. A referral level of about 30% is what you're looking for.

4. Referring URLs - This is the specific, non-search engine URLs that send traffic directly to your site. They represent the inbound links that are crucial for boosting your site’s search engine rankings and tells you which  sites or bloggers are linking to your site and what type of content they tend to like.

5. Most/Least Popular Pages - This is a comparison of the pages on your site that receive the most and least traffic that tells you which kind of content your visitors prefers.

6. Conversion Rate - This is the percentage of visitors to your site who take a desired action, such as purchasing a product or filling out a lead generation form. This tells you how well you're converting leads into fans or customers.

7. Bounce Rate - This is the percentage of new visitors who leave your site almost immediately after arriving, with no other interactions. A high bounce rate means that your visitors don't find your pages particularly compelling.

Interpreting the above metrics should give you some idea of just how well your site is performing. Hubspot has a bit more on all of these points, plus a few more, if you're interested.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

5 Analytic Metrics To Watch

Whether you're using StatCounter or Google Analytics or some other measurement tool, the different metrics that are measured can be daunting. If you want to know how your website or blog is doing at a glance, here are some measurements to zero in on.

Unique Visitors: This is the number of unique visitors to your site. It doesn't include people who have reloaded your page multiple times. I like to check this number for daily visitors, monthly visitors and against the previous month.

Visits or Pageloads: Don't be fooled, this is different from unique visitors. Some visitors will come back multiple times, while others will load different pages on your site, so this number will always be higher than Unique Visitors. Still, this does give an indication as to how useful your site is to your visitors in that a lot of page loads means your site is fairly sticky.

Source or Came From: This tells you how your visitors got to your site. It may have been through a link or through a search engine, but it's good to know, especially if one link is generating a lot of traffic.

Time On Site or Visit Length: This one is sort of a moving target because I'm not sure how accurate it is. Usually there will be a big number with a visit length of 5 seconds or less, and these can be attributed to people who found you from a search engine but determined that your page wasn't what they were looking for when they reached your site. The other numbers are much more telling though. If you have visitors that are staying on your site for 5 minutes or more that's a good thing, and if they're staying more than an hour, it tells you that you're offering a lot of great content.

Popular Pages: This is another metric that I like, especially if your site is fairly large with a lot of content, because it tells you exactly how many visits each page receives. This gives you an indication of how popular each piece of content is.

Once again, to really get a feel for how your blog or site is doing, compare it daily and monthly. This will tell you whether you're gaining more visitors or losing them. For more on this subject that's aimed more at Google Analytics, take a look at this article from searchengineland.com.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

The New Google Analytics Overlay

For those of you who rely on Google Analytics for your site numbers, Google has now added something called “In-Page Analytics.” It’s a neat new function that offers visualization of the page data and really makes it easy to see what's working and what's not.

I think this is going to make a huge impact on measurement and analysis, but I don't think you can appreciate it's power until you watch the following video that explains the new features in detail.

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Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

3 Free Online Measurement Tools

One of the questions I received at the recent ASCAP Expo event was about the kind of online measurement tools that I used, so I thought that might make a good topic for today's post. Believe it or not, I think that some of the free ones are the best, at least for me. These are the ones that I use all the time:

1) StatCounter - This is by far my favorite measurement tool. StatCounter provides a suite of measurements far more detailed than what you get from your ISP, like not only the number of unique visitors, but the entry and exit page, where they recently came from, the keywords used used to find the site, the time on site, the number of return visits, and location information detailed enough that you can almost see into the visitors house. You just place a piece of invisible code on your website or blog and away you go. StatCounter only remembers the info for your last 500 visitors, and anything beyond that requires a monthly fee, but the free version is still great.


2) Tynt Tracer - Another tool that requires that you insert some invisible code, Tynt Tracer differs from just about anything else in that it measures how many copies of text or graphics were made from your site or blog. In other words, if someone copies a piece of text from your site and inserts it on another site or blog, Tynt Tracer knows about it, and then can track how many visits came to your site from that copied piece. What's more, you can also program it to insert a Creative Commons license warning when someone copies and pastes your content. The analytics are difficult to decipher sometimes, but it's certainly a cool and useful tool.

3) Google Analytics - There's no code involved with Google Analytics. You just register your site or blog, then leave the rest to Google. You get somewhat the same information as with StatCounter, but you also get some trending information that's very useful.

There are a ton of paid measurement tools out there, but why spend any money until you really need to? These 3 will get you started and take care of most of your measurement needs for quite a while.

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Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.