Facebook has had a turbulent few months following its IPO fiasco, tumbling shares and accusations that fake profiles (or bots) are driving up ad prices. But one entrepreneur has come to the social network’s defence, claiming to have made $10,000 in one day via a vinyl records sale advertised on Facebook.
Brendan Irvine-Broque, the director of growth at PageLever, spent $150 to promote a garage sale using Facebook’s ‘Sponsored Stories’ events format, inviting people to come purchase his vintage vinyl records at $3 each.
On the event page, 341 people said they’d attend, with a further with 104 ‘maybes’. The event was a great success with a large turnout, selling 3,000 records and making $10,000 in sales.
Irvine-Broque posted this success story on his blog in direct response to a company’s claim that Facebook advertising fails because of the high click-through rate coming from bots.
He wrote about his experience on his blog (complete with picture evidence):
“I’d run Event Ads before, but I was skeptical – we’re these all real people who had not just clicked on the ad, but would actually show up at 9 AM on a Saturday?
“They were. Saturday morning, there was a huge line of people in front of my house. They kind of looked like zombies (I mean, Saturday mornings can be rough), but I can attest that they were definitely not bots.
“At the end of the day, hundreds of happy customers later, I counted $10,000 in cash (and some payments accepted via Square — yes, I’m reporting the income, IRS). Over 3,000 records sold in one afternoon. The majority of my customers came from Facebook ads, so what is the calculated ROI (return on investment), 2,000%? 3,000%? You do the math.
“No optimization, no professional consultant, no special relationship with an account manager. As far as I’m concerned, clicks coming from Facebook are the realest clicks in the game right now.
“Need to track them on your site, Limited Pressing? That’s what UTM tags and Mixpanel are for, dude.
“Argue over bots and javascript tracking on HN all you want – I’m busy growing another business. Actually, we’ve been thinking about running a few ads…wonder which platform we’ll choose…”