Kickstarter ROAS target: what should you aim for?

Somebody sent me a screenshot last week of an agency report claiming a 9.2x ROAS on their Kickstarter ads. The founder was thrilled. I asked how the agency was attributing the conversions. Two days later he came back embarrassed. The 9.2x was blended. The actual paid-only number, once you stripped out the pledges from Kickstarter’s own traffic and his warmed-up email list, was 1.8x.

Here’s the thing. A healthy Kickstarter ROAS target is 2.5x to 4x blended, or 1.5x to 2.5x on paid-only spend. Anything above 6x is either a genuinely brilliant campaign or, more commonly, some creative attribution. As an official Kickstarter Expert Partner, I’ve seen more of the second than the first.

This post is the target-number companion to my earlier piece on how ROAS is actually calculated. If you want the formula and a working spreadsheet, start there. If you want to know what number you should be chasing and when to pull the plug, keep reading.

Blended vs paid-only ROAS, and why the difference matters

Blended ROAS is the number your ads dashboard shows by default. Every pledge Facebook or TikTok’s pixel touched, however loosely, gets counted in the numerator. Divide that by ad spend and you get a very pretty multiplier.

Paid-only ROAS is different. It’s the pledges that came specifically from an ad click, tracked through a proper attribution setup and deduplicated against everything else that was driving traffic. Emails, PR, Kickstarter’s own recommendation engine, the badge on their homepage, backers arriving from press coverage. All of that has to come out of the paid column.

The gap between the two is enormous. On a well-run campaign with a warm email list and a bit of press, blended can sit at 4x while paid-only is 1.5x. Both are true. Only one tells you whether the ads are working.

Most campaign dashboards default to blended because it looks better on a slide. Agencies default to blended because it justifies the retainer. The founder is the only person in the room who benefits from paid-only, and the founder is the only person who usually doesn’t ask for it.

How agencies use blended ROAS to keep you paying

I’m not saying every agency does this deliberately. Some genuinely believe the platform’s attribution. Some just report what the dashboard shows and don’t dig further. But the effect is the same.

The report lands in your inbox showing 8x ROAS. You think the ads are printing money. The agency continues billing £3,000 a month plus a percentage of raise. Everyone’s happy until fulfilment starts and the maths stops working.

Meanwhile 6x of that 8x was backers who arrived from Kickstarter’s own platform traffic, from your press hit in a trade magazine, from the VIP list you spent three months building before launch. The ads earned 2x of it. The other 6x was earned by the pre-launch work you paid the agency to do anyway, and by Kickstarter, which you’re already giving 5 percent of every pledge.

If you take one thing from this post, take this. Ask your agency, in writing, this exact question: “What’s the ROAS on ads-attributed conversions only, net of platform fees and your retainer?” Then watch what happens.

Realistic paid ROAS by campaign phase

ROAS doesn’t stay flat across a 30-day campaign. It rides a curve, and knowing the curve helps you spot when a dip is normal and when it’s a problem.

Campaign phase	Realistic paid ROAS	What’s happening
Launch day + first 48 hours	2x to 4x	Warmest audience, lowest CPL, highest conversion
Mid-campaign (days 5-20)	1x to 2x	Audience cools, retargeting fatigue, quality drops
Final 48 hours	3x to 6x	Urgency kicks in, closing sequence, returning warm traffic

Launch-day numbers are high because you’re firing at people who already know you. Your VIP list, your retargeting audience, lookalikes of your best signups. Cost per pledge is low and the ROAS looks brilliant.

Then day five hits and the warm audience is exhausted. Now Meta’s spending your budget on colder cohorts who don’t know you yet. CPL climbs, conversion drops, and ROAS falls off a cliff. This is not the ads breaking. This is the ads doing what they always do at day five. Plan for it.

The final push is when it comes back. Urgency copy, “last 48 hours” ads, the closing email sequence pointing at retargeting audiences who saw the campaign but never pledged. Done properly, this stretch outperforms launch day on ROAS.

The floor: when to actually pause spend

Below 1x paid ROAS for three or four consecutive days means the ads are actively losing you money once you factor in platform fees. Kickstarter takes 5 percent, Stripe another 3 to 5 percent, and that’s before COGS, shipping, VAT, or an agency retainer.

At 1x paid ROAS, £1 of ad spend produces £1 of pledges. That £1 of pledges nets you around 90p after Kickstarter and Stripe, minus whatever the reward costs to make and ship. You’ve paid to lose money.

The lie founders tell themselves is “the ads are still learning”. Meta’s learning phase is 50 conversions in seven days per ad set. If you’ve been running for a fortnight and it’s still under 1x, it’s not learning. It’s telling you the funnel is broken. Pause it. Fix the creative or the audience or the offer. Restart.

Stuck on this exact bit? My £60 strategy call is the quickest way to get a sanity check before you spend another week hoping the numbers turn around.

The four hidden costs that make ROAS look better than it is

Every ROAS number you see is gross unless you’ve explicitly netted these out.

Platform and processing fees. Kickstarter’s 5 percent plus Stripe’s 3 to 5 percent takes 8 to 10 percent off the top before you calculate anything.

Reward fulfilment. COGS and shipping. A campaign showing 2x ROAS on paper can still be a loss once the pallets ship. This is why ROAS alone is a rubbish metric without a margin conversation next to it.

VAT and tax. UK founders pay 20 percent VAT on rewards to UK backers once VAT-registered. US founders deal with sales tax by state. Neither shows up in your ROAS calculation unless you put it there.

Agency retainer or percentage of raise. If your agency takes 10 to 15 percent of raise plus a monthly retainer, add all of it to the cost side. A 3x ROAS with a 15 percent agency cut looks very different from a 3x ROAS you ran yourself.

Cost per pound pledged is the honest number

If ROAS makes your eyes glaze over, calculate CPP instead. Cost Per Pound pledged.

CPP = (ad spend + agency fee + platform fees) ÷ pledges from paid traffic

If that number is above 60 to 70 pence per pound pledged, the ads aren’t working hard enough. Above 80p and you’re at or near break-even before you’ve even shipped anything. Above £1 and you’re paying to acquire loss-making backers, which is a business plan I don’t recommend.

CPP is nicer than ROAS because it gives you a physical intuition. Every pound of pledges cost me 65p to buy. Every pound cost me £1.10 to buy. You can feel whether it’s working without having to remember which multiplier is good.

How to spot vanity ROAS in an agency report

Four quick questions. Ask them all before your next call.

Does the report separate paid conversions from organic? If not, the ROAS is blended and probably overstated.

Does it net out Kickstarter and Stripe fees? If not, the “profit” figure is inflated by 8 to 10 percent.

Does it include the agency’s own retainer and percentage cut on the cost side? If not, the ROAS is the ads’ ROAS, not the campaign’s ROAS.

Is the attribution window a sensible one, like one-day click, or the default seven-day-click-one-day-view that Meta uses? The longer the window, the more organic traffic gets claimed as paid.

If the answers are no, no, no, and seven-day, treat the ROAS number in that report as marketing collateral, not a metric.

I audited one campaign where an agency was claiming a ROAS much higher than the founder was actually seeing in the bank. Two things had happened. The agency wasn’t including their own monthly fee on the cost side, and when I asked about the remaining gap they blamed Facebook not collecting all the data properly. Neither was a good answer. Trust only the data. If a number can’t be reconciled against the money actually in the account, it isn’t real.

When the numbers just aren’t there

Sometimes the ROAS is stuck below the floor and no amount of budget shuffling fixes it. That’s a funnel problem, not a spend problem.

The video isn’t converting. The audience is too broad or not Kickstarter-aware. The early-bird tier isn’t compelling enough. The landing page is confusing. The reward pricing is off. All of these will kill ROAS regardless of how clever the media buyer is.

Scaling spend on a broken funnel is the most common mistake I see. Founders assume more budget will surface the winning ad. It doesn’t. It surfaces the losing funnel to more people, faster.

Fix the funnel first. Then scale. In that order.

If you want the sister piece on how much to budget in the first place, I’ve written that up separately in Meta ads budget for Kickstarter. And if you want context on what a healthy cost per lead looks like before you get anywhere near ROAS, Kickstarter cost per lead for UK founders covers the pre-launch numbers.

Key takeaways

• Blended ROAS target: 2.5x to 4x. Paid-only ROAS target: 1.5x to 2.5x.
• Blended ROAS counts organic backers the ads didn’t earn. Paid-only is the honest number.
• If paid ROAS sits below 1x for three days, pause spend and review the funnel.
• Meta’s dashboard usually overstates ROAS by 20 to 40 percent versus Kickstarter’s own numbers.
• Include agency retainer, platform fees, and Stripe costs when calculating true ROAS.
• Cost Per Pound pledged above 70p means the ads are working too hard for the return.

Want a hand with yours?

If you’re mid-campaign and staring at a ROAS number you don’t trust, the fastest fix is a proper audit of your attribution setup and your ad account. My coaching package covers weekly reviews of exactly this, including a proper paid-vs-blended breakdown so you know which levers actually move the raise.

If you’d rather I run the ads myself, the done-for-you build includes the full media buy plus a clean attribution setup from day one, so the ROAS you’re reading each morning is the one you can actually trust.

Or if you just want a second pair of eyes before you commit, book the £60 strategy call and bring the last week of ad data. Half an hour, honest read, no retainer at the end of it.