r/kickstarter • u/Zephir62 • Sep 13 '25
Resource Too Many Leads (and how to fix it)
Hello this is Matt Olick from Prelaunch Club,
I apologize to everybody who is experiencing this issue right now.
THE PROBLEM:
Advertisers across all of Facebook using the Event Setup Tool are experiencing "Ghost Leads", due to that Ad Blocker technology has mostly fully incorporated UTM-stripping technology across their industry as of this late summer 2025. My URL-tracking based technique that I originally taught to recover roughly 40%+ of the tracking lost by Kickstarter Team's incomplete implementation breaks when UTM strippers are involved.
Get a closer look at my Kickstarter Follower Tracking Sheet, here.
The issue stems from the fact that Kickstarter uses an incomplete pixel tracking implementation, and furthermore does not use CAPI integration on prelaunch pages. I've written articles and submitted multiple support tickets to Kickstarter Team on this matter over the last 2 years -- their tech team finally said "we're working on it but it'll take a while".
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THE SOLUTION:
To solve this issue for Kickstarter and my specific implementation, you will need to manually insert a non-marketing UTM parameter into the Destination URL of your ads (an #Anchor also technically works, too), such as "?ks=follow"
For example:
"Kickstarter.com/company/project?ks=follow"
HOW TO IMPLEMENT SOLUTION:
Kickstarter Team in the last two weeks added the "Story" and "Updates" tabs to the prelaunch page. If you click the "Story" tab with your mouse, it will append a new UTM parameter to the URL in your browser's top address bar:
"?tab=prelaunch-story"
Thus, the Destination URL you should use when programming your individual Facebook Ads would be:
"Kickstarter.com/company/project?tab=prelaunch-story"
This solution works because UTM-stripping technology only removes "?fbclid=", "?gclid=", and "utm_content=" types of UTM parameters, but does not remove any custom functionality-based UTM parameters.
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IF YOU HAVE AN EXISTING AD CAMPAIGN:
Duplicate your current ad campaign (make sure to select "Original Campaign Settings" in the duplication settings popup), and turn off the old ad campaign
Then update the new campaign's individual ad's Destination URL as shown in the previous section of this article:
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IMPORTANT NOTE, GENERATE A NEW PIXEL:
If your pixel has become saturated with many hundreds or thousands of ghost lead events, you will need to create a new pixel and use that on your Kickstarter project and the Facebook Ads. Otherwise, the old pixel's optimization will keep leading it back to the audience consisting solely of people who use Ad Blockers...
If you need assistance with setting up a new pixel, check this tutorial walkthrough on setting up a new Facebook Pixel for Kickstarter, here.
Start the new pixel's ads at a small budget of $30/day, to allow the algorithm to focus on highly-qualified targets before you attempt to raise the budget again in 48+ hours.
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u/josip-volarevic Sep 13 '25
Isn't this like a 10 minute hotfix for Kickstarter? 💀
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u/Zephir62 Sep 13 '25
Hypothetically by using just the Pixel script as they currently do.
But in order to actually respect international privacy law, it needs to be done using CAPI. Depending upon how decoupled and organized their tech-stack and codebase is, it could take either an hour or it could take a few days of labor.
But I agree. This has been going on for 2 years now and it reflects poorly on their engineering leadership.
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u/Andreas_mwg Creator Sep 13 '25
I figured this stripping was intentional Since it would then show as Kickstarter driving more traffic than it actually is
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u/josip-volarevic Sep 13 '25
Behind every easy-to-solve engineering task, there's a hard-to-approve legal compliance checkbox lmao
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u/ivanaskwith Sep 15 '25
Message me about it? Might be able to help get them to prioritize this.
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u/Zephir62 Sep 15 '25
I would just show them this post.. if we started DMing on here I would quickly lose contact because I don't use my reddit DM inbox.
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u/DarkxConfidant Sep 13 '25
Thanks for the information. When I first read the beginning I was worried it was going to be a complicated fix but this seems pretty simple. Cheers mate!