How I made $10k in one day with Facebook Ads (re: bots)
In light of the speculation about bots on Facebook, and tech journalists who have resorted to trolling Hacker News for stories, I’d like to share a story about how Facebook ads brought real human beings to my house at 9 AM on a Saturday to spend real money.
Before I started working in tech, I founded and ran a business selling vintage vinyl records. It was fun, but the records were piling up in storage at my folks’ place (thanks for your patience, mom!) and I needed to get rid of all these records that were piling up.
I created a Facebook Event, shared it on Facebook, and spun up a few ads for it targeting people who liked other record-related Pages on Facebook. The ads looked like this:
Took about a half hour. Three weeks and $150 later, there were 341 people “attending”, and 104 “maybes”. 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. For the next five hours, the scene looked kind of like this:
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 3000 records sold in one afternoon. The majority of my customers came from Facebook Ads, so what is the calculated ROI, 2000%? 3000%? 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…
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