It's worth noting that this was a local ad in the Bay Area, near Berkeley.<p><a href="http://g.co/maps/6vmc6" rel="nofollow">http://g.co/maps/6vmc6</a><p>i.e. the garage sale took place in a highly-cultured, net-savvy area full of people who do bargain/antique shopping. Back in the late 2000s, my friends in the same area put a cheap 30 word ad in the local newspaper for a garage sale and got dozens of visitors. I don't know how much the ad cost but probably something like 50 to 60 dollars.<p>It's hard to gauge how much of a "success" this is when a Craigslist ad, plus some postings on large music mag forums (and I'm sure SF/Berkeley have their own large local websites) would've drawn the same attention...with a little more handiwork on the seller's end, but without costing $150.<p>* edit: I'd even argue that he might have drawn <i>more</i> people in with Craigslist and a few other nichey-type posts. I'm not a record-collector myself, but I'm guessing that there's a fair amount of them who are used to "digging" to find gems, as opposed to checking out ads/events on Facebook...antique collectors regularly scour the old-fashioned newspaper ads for garage sales because they know the type of old-fashioned people who might have undiscovered antiques are also the type to advertise in newspapers.
Lots of talk about the gross money coming in. But it seems to skim over the fact that there's a real product being exchanged. Records being sold at $3 seems like a bargain, but what was the cost of these records to begin with?<p>Sure you made $10,000 in sales, but that's not $10,000 profit, and definitely not a ROI of 2000-3000%.
The point about revenue != profit isn't very clever, though 1/3 of the existing comments are making it. The <i>actual</i> point is that he was able to successfully drive traffic to his event using FB ads. Every comment addressing profit vs. revenue entirely misses the point.
"I counted $10,000 in cash (and some payments accepted via Square - yes, I’m reporting the income, IRS"<p>As an aside the only reason he owes taxes to the IRS would be if this was inventory that he purchased and expensed for the business.<p>If you pay money out of your pocket for some CD's and sell the CD's and assuming you recoup only the amount paid you don't owe taxes on the money that you collected. You haven't made a profit.<p>There aren't enough details in the OP to determine the proper tax treatment of the sale of these records. But typically if he was in business he would have bought records and they would be inventory. When he closed down the business he would have had a taxable event and had to dispose of the inventory and there might have been a loss. He could have purchased that inventory as a private person for any amount and then he becomes the owner. At that point typically any gain over what he paid he <i>might</i> owe taxes.<p>The IRS is not trolling around looking for people who post stories and spending time to see if they reported the income. Besides this would relate to 2012 income which wouldn't be reported until April 2013 and with an extension the return wouldn't be due until Oct 2013.<p>And lest you think someone could turn him in or tip the IRS off - not going to happen. If you don't believe me try to contact the IRS and tell them your neighbor is cheating on their taxes. They want tangible proof. Proof enough to open a case which involves access to actual numbers and records. Like you worked in the office not "I know he's cheating" type info. A story is not enough to get them to investigate. Besides there is nothing they can do until <i>he doesn't pay the taxes</i> by the above dates.<p>Side story: I know of pharmacist locally who dealt in drugs (and went to prison) who was found with $200,000 in cash in his home safe. Eyebrows were raised. Oh boy cash! Did he report it!<p>No problem he went to jail for the drug charges but had no problem with the $200,000. He just reported it on his next tax return that was due. Problem solved.
> calculated ROI, 2000%? 3000%? You do the math.<p>We can't, because we have no idea what you paid for those LPs when you bought them. $10 each? You're confusing turnover with earnings (and "we're" with "were", btw).
As has been pointed out the 10k is revenue, not profit. At $3 a record I doubt there was much profit at all, though it sounds more like a liquidating event so it is still a happy result.<p>To the point of the article though, he advertised on facebook and people showed up and gave him money. Whether or not he is actually profiting from the business isn't really relevant. His ROI is clearly wrong, but the ads had the desired effect of bring in customers.<p>I really hope he doesn't report 10k in profit to the IRS though as he would then be losing even more money than he probably already did on that sale.
The author points out that Limited Pressing should be using UTM tags and Mixpanel to track visitors to their site from Facebook, which was not at all the issue that Limited Pressing was concerned with. The issue they had was with paying for those visitors when they shouldn't have to.<p>As the author's current company is based on providing a layer on top of Facebook Analytics/Insights I could see how hearing that 80% of clicks may be bots could be disheartening, but there is no need to lash out at Limited Pressing for presenting their own perspective.
I can see this scenario working - local event, targeted adverts, non-commodity product.<p>The concern with FB (and other social platform advertising) is around 'intent' and whether you can viably sell commodity product to visitors not actively searching for the commodity product in the way you can by advertising on a search platform - and whether the pricing on a social platform should reflect a different quality of referral.
Brilliant marketing play for PageLever :) Not saying his story isn't genuine.. just saying it's a perfectly timed post targeted at the perfect audience for the product. He knows what he's doing so definitely not surprised he can put together a successful Facebook campaign.
Lesson: facebook ads work great for selling items at below cost.<p>I'm not sure ads were needed in the first place; an event and posting on the pages he talked about /a couple of forums may well have had a similar result.
The article reminded me of a thought I had regarding FB's monetization strategy: strictly local advertisements. The ad matching algorithm would place the most weight on geographical distance then interests etc. FB's ubiquitous nature today could make this work.<p>Here's a use case that motivated the idea: I live in a densely populated area where everyone around me has a car. Say I wake up to a flat tire. I'd much rather pay someone $20 to just fix it in 10 minutes than get the car towed or figure out how to do it myself. Imagine searching for "fix spare tire" on Facebook and receiving search results for five people that all live with-in two blocks. Choose a person, agree to pay with cash, they show up and fix the tire.<p>The service FB provides in this example has real value. If this service existed I'd actually use Facebook, take a good look at the ads and perhaps even pay a small monthly fee.<p>To use an over-used term I see this as "the Airbnb of everything else". It could be applied to simple plumbing tasks like fixing the toilet (which was a real pain-in-the-ass to figure out). It could even apply to borrowing vacuum cleaners! The point is there's under-utilized resources around people. Imagine FB helping people utilize these resources like Airbnb helps people utilize extra living space.
It may not be the author's intention to imply this, and I'm glad he had a good experience, but it's worth mentioning that this is a single experience, and not necessarily evidence that some Facebook ad campaigns aren't being hit with false clicks.
Sold 3000 records fro 10k$. I bet he spent much more when he was buying all those records, say 20k$? So, I could read the story as someone lost 10k$ in 10 years because of Facebook ads.<p>And I'm sure someone creating facebook ad analytic service would claim that facebook ads are effective.
For fun, let's look at the net income from this venture.<p>The seller sold about 3,300 records. Let's say that he paid an average of $0.60 per records. That's a cost of goods sold of $1,980 and a gross margin of $8,120. The Facebook ad cost $150, which brings net income in at $7,970. Not bad, hey?<p>As per return on investment, let's toss in a measure of time. Let's say that, over the years, the seller spends an average of two minutes on each piece of vinyl he sell. That means that he spent 6,600 minutes (110 hours) on these 3,300 pieces of vinyl. Add in another 6 hours for the sale and the seller still made over $69/hour off of this venture.<p>This analysis ignores all the time it takes to become good enough to actually deal records.
You are not quite right, for you, yes, your clicks may be real, because frankly you're small fry. You aren't managing a brand, there is no one's job hanging on the success of your campaign, no one needs to prove anything to you. So no bot is going to click on your links. However, for ad-agencies, and other big marketing companies, I know for a fact, that some of them engage in purchasing clicks for the marketing campaigns they do for their clients. Why? Because their reputation hangs on the success of the campaign. Slow campaign? Buy a 1000 clicks! I KNOW it is done.
How did you manage all those people? If there are so many people at the same time looking through your stuff, how can you be sure they don't run off and steal something?
You created an EVENT. The EVENT cannot be added via a bot, so facebook was protecting itself essentially. Event invitations and click-through are different. Just sayin'
I would be interested in seeing the statistics on the advertisements themselves. Did the OP see an 80/20 response rate like Limited Run? What was the ratio of people who showed up to the event versus the ratio of clicks on the ads versus the number who said they would attend the event on facebook versus actually showing up. Please provide more information, otherwise I see this article as useless babble with a plug at the end.
"No optimization, no professional consultant, no special relationship with an account manager."<p>Mildly disingenuous to not mention your own expertise, given that you're plugging a Facebook optimization platform that you created at the end of your post.<p>Also mildly linkbait-y title given the whole "made $10k" text -- if I sell a crate of contents worth $20k+ market value for $10k... but others have commenting on that already.
My sense is that if you can regularly acquire and store thousands of vintage LPs for less than $3 per record, it doesn't matter where you advertise the yard sale.<p>Glad to hear Facebook ads resulted in greater than zero hits, but I'm guessing so would CL, posters in coffee shops, a sign taped to the back window of a car...
This mirrors my (extremely limited) experience with Facebook ads. They really suck for driving traffic to your site, and you'll see an obscenely high bounce rate. But, if you're trying to drive traffic to something ON Facebook (like this event), they work pretty well.
This is a nice happy story, but how can you be sure the attendees came from the Facebook adverts and not word of mouth / recommendations that Facebook displays about events friends are attending? That seems much more likely to me as the source of your success.
$10,000 at $3/album means over 3000 albums were sold that day, out of 6000 available (according to his ad). So more than half of this random collection was worth buying, and if lets say each person buys three albums, over 1000 people came to his house?
A basic question: How does the bot owner gets benefited by driving up clicks on FB ads? I understand in case of AdSense, the owner of the site would get cut. But how does the bot owner gets cut from the ads that are displayed on FB pages?
Did I understand correctly that the "other business he is growing" is an analytics platform for Facebook ads?<p>Here's the link I got from the post: <a href="http://pagelever.com/" rel="nofollow">http://pagelever.com/</a><p>If so, so much for impartiality.
I work in the marketing department of one of the biggest nightlife companies in the world. Facebook ads for our events/nights have been so successful for us that we stopped doing google ads.
You're hosting your blog on Tumblr and the Facebook ad had your address on it, you can't really have input on the allocation of ad clicks if you don't have the server logs to show it.
Cool story, but he should have mentioned his other business does "better Facebook Analytics than you ever thought possible". The fact that he didn't makes my bias radar beep.
There is only one thing I want to know behind the story is if the author has purchased facebook stock or not. Just some background info might help understand the motivation.
The best way to make a small fortune selling records is to start out with a large one. This is a great story, but there is a value proposition here most ads don't have.
Was it $10k net or gross?<p>If you are counting your inventory as "free" or written-off already, and you sell cheap, I guess it would be easy to have sales?
No, you didn't "made $10K". You basically sold records that you paid for previously. Not only that, but most likely you sold them at a loss. I doubt you paid $3 for them.